Bending Home: Selected & New Poems 1967-1998

by Susan Griffin

Respected feminist writer's collected poetical works balance the personal with the public and political.

Genres: Poetry

247 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1998

About the author

Susan Griffin is an award winning poet, writer, essayist and playwright who has written nineteen books, including A Chorus of Stones, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Named by Utne reader as one of the top hundred visionaries of the new millenium, she is the recipient of an Emmy for her play Voices, an NEA grant and a MacArthur Grant for Peace and International Cooperation. Her latest work, Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy, on being an American Citizen has been called "fresh, probing" and "incisive" by Booklist.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

811.54 G8525b 1998

[Kerfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't sure how to rate this book of poetry. It's between a 3 and a 4. There are lots of good lines, but not that many that cohere to form good poems.

I took this book out of the library because I really liked two poems of Griffin's in an anthology I read--"I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman" and "Sunday Morning"--but none of the poems here had that same freshness for me.

In a lot of the writing Griffin seems to be trying too hard to be profound, and too many of the personal poems border on self-pity. She is at her best when she gets outside herself.

how you shut
your eyes and swam far and farther
still, starlight
shaping itself to your body,
starship rocking the grand, slow waves
under white trees, in the
snowy night
--"Great as You Are"

[Heather]

For years I've kept a copy of her poem "Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields" but I never knew who the poet was. I'm so pleased to have found this book. I can't wait to read the rest of her work!

http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Love_Should_Grow.html