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Colors Passing Through Us: Poems
In Colors Passing Through Us , Marge Piercy is at the height of her powers, writing about what matters to her the lives of women, nature, Jewish ritual, love between men and women, and politics, sexual and otherwise.
Feisty and funny as always, she turns a sharp eye on the world around her, bidding an exhausted farewell to the twentieth century and singing an "electronic breakdown blues" for the twenty-first. She memorializes movingly those who, like los desaparecidos and the victims of 9/11, disappear suddenly and without a trace.
She writes an elegy for her mother, a woman who struggled with a deadening round o fhousework, washin gon Monday, ironing on Tuesday, and so on, "until stroke broke/her open." She remembers the scraps of lace, the touch of velvet, that were part of her maternal inheritance and fist aroused her sensual curiosity.
Here are paeans to the pleasures of the natural world (rosy ripe tomatoes, a mating dance of hawks) as the poet confronts her own mortality in the cycle of seasons and the eternity of the "iam hurrying, I am running hard / toward I don't know what, / but I mean to arrive before dark." Other poems--about her grandmother's passage from Russia to the New World, or the interrupting of a Passover seder to watch a comet pass--expand on Piercy's appreciation of Jewish life that won her so much acclaim in The Art of Blessing the Day .
Colors Passing Through Us is a moving celebration of the endurance of love an dof the phenomenon of life itself--a book to treasure.
Feisty and funny as always, she turns a sharp eye on the world around her, bidding an exhausted farewell to the twentieth century and singing an "electronic breakdown blues" for the twenty-first. She memorializes movingly those who, like los desaparecidos and the victims of 9/11, disappear suddenly and without a trace.
She writes an elegy for her mother, a woman who struggled with a deadening round o fhousework, washin gon Monday, ironing on Tuesday, and so on, "until stroke broke/her open." She remembers the scraps of lace, the touch of velvet, that were part of her maternal inheritance and fist aroused her sensual curiosity.
Here are paeans to the pleasures of the natural world (rosy ripe tomatoes, a mating dance of hawks) as the poet confronts her own mortality in the cycle of seasons and the eternity of the "iam hurrying, I am running hard / toward I don't know what, / but I mean to arrive before dark." Other poems--about her grandmother's passage from Russia to the New World, or the interrupting of a Passover seder to watch a comet pass--expand on Piercy's appreciation of Jewish life that won her so much acclaim in The Art of Blessing the Day .
Colors Passing Through Us is a moving celebration of the endurance of love an dof the phenomenon of life itself--a book to treasure.
- GenresPoetry
163 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
7 people are currently reading
101 people want to read
About the author
Marge Piercy
111 books933 followersMarge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone To Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone To Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone To Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone To Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
March 10, 2018
Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is known for her feminist writings in many genres beyond her poetry, including historical fiction and science fiction. I haven’t yet read any of her novels, but since April is National Poetry Month and my book club participates by sharing poems, I thought I’d start here to see what Piercy’s writing is like.
The summary says it all about this book and says it best, so I’ll simply add that this collection, published in 2003, was intense, beautiful, and at times, disturbing to read. Piercy didn’t shy away from difficult emotions like sadness and bitterness, and she didn’t ignore subjects like death and disenchantment. But with the same intensity in which she approached them, she gave equal fervor to writing about nature, family traditions, love, and hope. There was even a bit of humor in some of her poems which was unexpected in the midst of such seriousness, and it provided a welcome relief. But I’ll let the poet speak for herself now with a sample of some of her poems from this book that made an impression on me.
“Rising in Perilous Hope”
What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?
What words can I say that will catch in your mind
like burrs, chiggers that burrow?
If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.
If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?
I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.
I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning
come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.
“Love’s Clay”
Love is a lumpy thing
Infatuation is peacock tales,
fountains of rose petals,
always music underneath
like a movie crescendoing.
Love is cutting onions
for supper when you are
already tired. Love is patched
of hope and habit and desire,
a tent mended nightly.
Love is tough as a bone
you gnaw on, suck out
the marrow. Love is a bone
of which you make soup
and, surprise, it sustains you.
Infatuation is fun, a tango
in a grove of mirrors. Love
is just work, what you do
one day after the next
like bricks laid end to end
and finally infatuation
leaves you with a sticky
sweet residue in the bottom
of the glass, and love is all
you remember as you’re dying.
“The Day My Mother Died”
I seldom have premonitions of death.
That day opened like any
ordinary can of tomatoes.
The alarm drilled into my ear.
The cats stirred and one leapt off.
The scent of coffee slipped into my head
like a lover into my arms and I sighed,
drew the curtains and examined
the face of the day.
I remember no dreams of loss.
No dark angel rustled ominous wings
or whispered gravely.
I was caught by surprise
like the trout that takes the fly
and I gasped in the fatal air.
You were gone suddenly as a sound
fading in the coil of the ear
no trace, no print, no ash
“Time of Year”
A time of year of dusty ritual
and fresh apples and pumpkins.
To believe is to work at believing.
They say that labor is prayer,
and prayer is certainly work.
Dust on my forehead, dust
in my eyes, burning dust.
Indifference is worse than despair
because despair still cares.
Dust stifles any cry. Yet
I go at dawn and sit on the dike
meditating on the horizon’s rim
two cormorants sentineled
on a dinghy waiting for alewives
different hungers but fierce
both of us, me apparently still
but cooking within. Then wings
spread wide in my chest,
the great beak strikes me
till I break into light.
Illumination never lasts, but it
comes, it comes, and all I can
do is prepare, to open, to
wait like the hungry cormorant
for the first flicker of light.
The summary says it all about this book and says it best, so I’ll simply add that this collection, published in 2003, was intense, beautiful, and at times, disturbing to read. Piercy didn’t shy away from difficult emotions like sadness and bitterness, and she didn’t ignore subjects like death and disenchantment. But with the same intensity in which she approached them, she gave equal fervor to writing about nature, family traditions, love, and hope. There was even a bit of humor in some of her poems which was unexpected in the midst of such seriousness, and it provided a welcome relief. But I’ll let the poet speak for herself now with a sample of some of her poems from this book that made an impression on me.
“Rising in Perilous Hope”
What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?
What words can I say that will catch in your mind
like burrs, chiggers that burrow?
If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.
If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?
I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.
I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning
come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.
“Love’s Clay”
Love is a lumpy thing
Infatuation is peacock tales,
fountains of rose petals,
always music underneath
like a movie crescendoing.
Love is cutting onions
for supper when you are
already tired. Love is patched
of hope and habit and desire,
a tent mended nightly.
Love is tough as a bone
you gnaw on, suck out
the marrow. Love is a bone
of which you make soup
and, surprise, it sustains you.
Infatuation is fun, a tango
in a grove of mirrors. Love
is just work, what you do
one day after the next
like bricks laid end to end
and finally infatuation
leaves you with a sticky
sweet residue in the bottom
of the glass, and love is all
you remember as you’re dying.
“The Day My Mother Died”
I seldom have premonitions of death.
That day opened like any
ordinary can of tomatoes.
The alarm drilled into my ear.
The cats stirred and one leapt off.
The scent of coffee slipped into my head
like a lover into my arms and I sighed,
drew the curtains and examined
the face of the day.
I remember no dreams of loss.
No dark angel rustled ominous wings
or whispered gravely.
I was caught by surprise
like the trout that takes the fly
and I gasped in the fatal air.
You were gone suddenly as a sound
fading in the coil of the ear
no trace, no print, no ash
“Time of Year”
A time of year of dusty ritual
and fresh apples and pumpkins.
To believe is to work at believing.
They say that labor is prayer,
and prayer is certainly work.
Dust on my forehead, dust
in my eyes, burning dust.
Indifference is worse than despair
because despair still cares.
Dust stifles any cry. Yet
I go at dawn and sit on the dike
meditating on the horizon’s rim
two cormorants sentineled
on a dinghy waiting for alewives
different hungers but fierce
both of us, me apparently still
but cooking within. Then wings
spread wide in my chest,
the great beak strikes me
till I break into light.
Illumination never lasts, but it
comes, it comes, and all I can
do is prepare, to open, to
wait like the hungry cormorant
for the first flicker of light.
January 29, 2021
Every aging woman knows that inside,
behind her face, her scrawny neck
and puffy cheeks, the same swan
girl swims over her reflection:
we are all that we once were
behind the mirror in that downy cave.
The same gaze measures the world.
If the ghost did rise from the failing
body, what age would it be?
Myself, I can't spare a single year.
I see my younger selves on landings
of that winding stair of years, gesticulating,
weeping, banging my head on the stone
of indifference, clawing until my hands
bled on the granite flesh of cold lovers,
fighting the wrong battles in the right wars,
dropping words that would swarm me, stinging.
I wring what wisdom I own from every hour.
May 27, 2018
There are some very good poems in here. Marge Piercy has some very sensual pieces when in love, when in bed. “The Animal Kingdom,” for example: “We soar into obsidian nights then dive clutched like falcons, talons interlocked, the wind beating in our hot blood as we shriek our razor sharp joy.” Or “The First time I tasted you”: “The first time I tasted you I thought strange: metallic, musty, with salt and cinnamon, the sea and the kitchen safety and danger.”
She writes in the familiar and some of the poems re stronger than others. She writes of Jewish holidays and ritual, of her ancestors,of her childhood and her dream of packing her four cats in suitcases or trying to find them all before she leaves on a trip.
There is a beautiful poem about rain, “The rain as wine,” and she writes : “it is a ripe rain coming down in big fat drops like grapes dropping on the roof—white grapes round as moons.”
She also wrote of the domestic violence of her neighborhood growing up in “Family values”: he never got home until ten or sometimes midnight. We always knew because that soft voice of his usually stuck in his throat like cotton batting would rise, an electric saw caught in a board.”
Some very fine poems in this collection.
She writes in the familiar and some of the poems re stronger than others. She writes of Jewish holidays and ritual, of her ancestors,of her childhood and her dream of packing her four cats in suitcases or trying to find them all before she leaves on a trip.
There is a beautiful poem about rain, “The rain as wine,” and she writes : “it is a ripe rain coming down in big fat drops like grapes dropping on the roof—white grapes round as moons.”
She also wrote of the domestic violence of her neighborhood growing up in “Family values”: he never got home until ten or sometimes midnight. We always knew because that soft voice of his usually stuck in his throat like cotton batting would rise, an electric saw caught in a board.”
Some very fine poems in this collection.
June 23, 2017
One of those books of poetry where I often found that I couldn't help but read a poem out loud to the nearest person. I love the imagery of the poetry.
February 3, 2025
This collection has dozens of great lines and maybe 3 great poems.
March 1, 2025
I enjoyed this collection very much. The entwining of nature with family and life and history.
July 25, 2025
An excellent collection of poems. Her poems about love, sexuality, and grief were particularly evocative.
January 4, 2009
Rising in Perilous Hope
What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?
What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?
If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.
If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?
I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the colors of my eyes.
I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning
come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.
Flying of the Nebraska of my life
So much of our lives dissolves.
What did I do the day before
I met you? You remember
what I was wearing that holiday.
What did I wear the next morning?
What did I write the day my mother died?
I fly at night over plains.
There is a cluster of lights,
a starfish shape glittering. Then
darkness and darkness.
Then another clump bearing
long daisy petals of roadway.
Then nothing again. How much
of my living has fled like water
into sand. The sand is not
even damp to the hand.
Tears and wine and sparkling
water all vanish the same.
I know looking out the plane's
dirty window that there are houses,
barns, roads, trees, stores
distinct in that darkness I once
drove through. I knew them and will
never know them again.
The plane is flying from lighted
place to lighted place, but
our arc is from the dark into
brightness then back into darkness.
I want to possess my own life like a
necklace, pearl by pearl of light.
What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?
What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?
If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.
If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?
I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the colors of my eyes.
I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning
come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.
Flying of the Nebraska of my life
So much of our lives dissolves.
What did I do the day before
I met you? You remember
what I was wearing that holiday.
What did I wear the next morning?
What did I write the day my mother died?
I fly at night over plains.
There is a cluster of lights,
a starfish shape glittering. Then
darkness and darkness.
Then another clump bearing
long daisy petals of roadway.
Then nothing again. How much
of my living has fled like water
into sand. The sand is not
even damp to the hand.
Tears and wine and sparkling
water all vanish the same.
I know looking out the plane's
dirty window that there are houses,
barns, roads, trees, stores
distinct in that darkness I once
drove through. I knew them and will
never know them again.
The plane is flying from lighted
place to lighted place, but
our arc is from the dark into
brightness then back into darkness.
I want to possess my own life like a
necklace, pearl by pearl of light.
May 29, 2010
Years ago, I went on a Marge Piercy kick and read every single one of her novels over the course of a year. I loved them. This, however, is the first volume of her poetry that I've read, though I've always been tickled to come across her poems in anthologies or literary journals.
First and foremost, I'm astounded at how prolific Piercy is. This is a fat volume, more poetry that I suspect many poets write in a life time, and it is only one 15 books of poetry she has published. And while the quality of the work is inconsistent--i.e. some of the poems are close to spectacular while others or closer to mediocre--I gave the book 5 stars on the sheer breadth of the ideas she addresses--cats, gardens, the dark, loss, love, politics, and seasoning vinegar to name a few. The woman revels in fresh, surprising metaphor.
One of my favorite poems is "The Joys of Bad Reputation" in which Piercy speaks to her critics, especially those who fault her feminism. I savored her love poems and was close to tears reading the poems about her mother. I will use a line from one her poems to express my response to this book: "Whenever you touch my mind unexpectedly. . . I know I will never be done knowing you."
First and foremost, I'm astounded at how prolific Piercy is. This is a fat volume, more poetry that I suspect many poets write in a life time, and it is only one 15 books of poetry she has published. And while the quality of the work is inconsistent--i.e. some of the poems are close to spectacular while others or closer to mediocre--I gave the book 5 stars on the sheer breadth of the ideas she addresses--cats, gardens, the dark, loss, love, politics, and seasoning vinegar to name a few. The woman revels in fresh, surprising metaphor.
One of my favorite poems is "The Joys of Bad Reputation" in which Piercy speaks to her critics, especially those who fault her feminism. I savored her love poems and was close to tears reading the poems about her mother. I will use a line from one her poems to express my response to this book: "Whenever you touch my mind unexpectedly. . . I know I will never be done knowing you."
July 6, 2022
These poems speak to experiences in life, especially of a woman, but they are experiences in and of themselves. A gasp, a laugh, a shudder, a poke at the heart, all wrought by the words of Marge Piercy.
November 9, 2015
Since I've read many of Piercy's 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s poetry collections, I found this 2003 collection particularly fascinating. Piercy's feminism has muted with age, but it has also combined in at least one poem. In "The clock in the closet," for example, Piercy's conception of body image and the mirror as a way of viewing oneself combine. Body image (celebration of bigger women, support of those struggling with anorexia), love, and marriage seem to be major themes in her feminist progression. Her tone has matured and often seems to be the voice of aged wisdom. A deeper reading is needed to appreciate her poems about her mother, but overall, the collection is worth the read.
January 4, 2014
A bit slow at first with lots of poems about Piercy's mother's death. However, the last half was full of gems, many about Jewish spirituality or adult love.
My favorite poems in this collection were:
* No one came home - one of the best 9-11 poems I've ever read
* In the department store
* Sometimes while I am chanting - about spiritual experience
* Tapuz: an orange - the scandal of female rabbis
* Black leaves - adult love
* Roomers, rumors
My favorite poems in this collection were:
* No one came home - one of the best 9-11 poems I've ever read
* In the department store
* Sometimes while I am chanting - about spiritual experience
* Tapuz: an orange - the scandal of female rabbis
* Black leaves - adult love
* Roomers, rumors
June 14, 2007
I can't believe I actually read an entire Marge Piercy collection.
Read
January 7, 2013811.54 P618c 2003
June 2, 2013
I appreciate poetry, but it is exceedingly rare I would list a book of poetry as a favorite of any sort. This is one of only two exceptions I can think of.
May 29, 2015
This line from Photograph of my mother sitting on the steps:
"Blessed are we who cannot know what will come to us, our upturned faces following through the sky the sun of love."
Wonderful.
"Blessed are we who cannot know what will come to us, our upturned faces following through the sky the sun of love."
Wonderful.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews