Chelsea Newnam
Marge Piercy Book Review
October 30, 2007 ENG 371
Everyone knows that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, but what are big girls made of? This is precisely the question Marge Piercy asks and answers in her thusly titled poetry collection. What are Big Girls Made of? explores the nuts and bolts of womanhood by exposing its joys, struggles, and necessities. Divided into five sections, the book surveys life through different windows in which the woman is always the observer.
A sequence of seven poems known as “The Brother-less Poems” commences the collection. Here, Piercy describes her relationship with a half-brother, fourteen years her elder. The poems progress from the closeness of their childhood through their estranged relationship as adults, leading eventually to his death. This elegiac series serves as both a commemoration of her brother’s memory and Piercy’s own release of his spirit. The first poem begins with dense detail, but as the sequence evolves, the poems turn from vivid language to condensed and economized three-lined stanzas. In the last poem of this section Piercy asserts, “It is hard / to say goodbye to nothing / personal, mouthfuls bitten off / of silence and wet ashes.” As this progression builds and concludes, we imagine that Piercy is building herself up to finally saying goodbye to her brother’s memory.
As Piercy transitions from the death of a prominent male figure in her life, it is appropriate that the next section of the book be entitled “What are Big Girls Made of?”. This division of the collection is an eclectic barrage of the glories and setbacks of womanhood and of life. Piercy invades her readers with strong imagery and provocative situations that play to the political and societal obstructions of life and of femininity. The opening poem, “What are big girls made of?”, addresses media’s mandate for women to look and act a certain way. It states boldly that society dictates that women be “retooled, refitted and redesigned / every decade” and begs that instead we should “like each other raw”. Piercy’s strong identity as a woman and her willingness to be an individual speaks out against the injustices of the female stereotype. “For two women shot to death, in Brookline, Massachusetts” is Piercy’s response to a shooting at an abortion clinic occurring on December 30, 1994. Repetition, a characteristic of much of Marge Piercy’s work, serves to emphasize points and persuade readers. In this poem, the repetition of the phrases “choose to”, “women who”, “who decides”, “such men”, and “stand up now” amongst others, provoke awareness and instill a greater sense of grief in the reader. The section also includes striking poems concerning sexual harassment, anger, free love, civil rights, conformity, and even an elegy to the late feminist activist and poet, Audre Lorde.
As we continue to travel through the vast world of the female spirit that Piercy has illuminated, we stop at the next section, “Salt in the Afternoon”, a collage of poems on love and sex. A feminist collection simply would not be a feminist collection without sexual awakening, and Marge Piercy rises to the occasion. The opening poem, “Moonburn”, conveys the desires of a woman who has “stayed under the moon too long”, or has been chaste, as the moon is often symbolic of. Moon imagery rears again in the section’s title poem, “Salt in the afternoon”. This segment of the book presents sex in a multitude of ways: weapon, joy, comfort, feast, habit. The languid and elusive approach Piercy takes towards language seduces her readers into the intricacy of the pieces. Intermittently, she places poems about the struggles and rewards of love and companionship. The last poem of this portion, “On guard” is such a poem, comparable to traditional wedding vows in content. Piercy opens this section with a poem about lust, yet ending with a poem about commitment leaves the reader with a sense that lust and sexuality can evolve into something deeper if cultivated properly.
“A Precarious Balance”, the next division of the collection, is notably the only section titled by a line in one of its poems, rather than the title of one. The name pulls from a line in the poem “Syzygy”, the last of the grouping. Piercy writes, “Sometimes I drift in a precarious balance, / caught between opposing pulls, / turning on my own axis in peace”. This statement characterizes the theme of ambiguity running throughout these poems, bringing readers to ask themselves - where does the inner world stop and the outer world begin? In an attempt to bring the existential to a personal level, Piercy writes about nature and the environment in such a way that allows her readers to parallel what she describes to something in his or her own life. Whether speaking of a deer, metals, the earth, or the sky, personification is masterfully employed to bring about interesting connections between humanity and the natural world.
The last section, “My boa”, is a compilation of poetry about personal identity and awakening, fear stirred with hope. It brims with poetry about aging, death, illness, and religion. Piercy’s strong Jewish faith surfaces throughout poems like “Kaddish”, “Season of breakage”, “Season of the egg”, “Matzoh”, and “Breadcrumbs”, in which she speaks of the Jewish tradition as well as holidays such as Passover, Yon Kippur, and Rosh Hashana. Appropriately placed at the close of the collection, these themes expose the finality of life through faith and through optimism. The last poem, “The art of blessing the day”, closes with “What we want to change we curse and then / pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can / with eyes and hands and tongue. If you / can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.” These ending lines leave the reader with a strengthening sense of vitality and coerce him or her into embracing the positive possibility in every situation.
Marge Piercy’s What are Big Girls Made of? seems to answer its own question. Big girls – women, are made of family, choice, freedom, persistence, sexuality, purity, love, hope, faith, desire, and all of the other wonderful things the world has to offer. Piercy invites readers to sit down with her book before standing up for the rights of women. This is not a collection to be read and tossed on the shelf for dust to clothe. It is a living, breathing entity. Piercy tells it how it is, nothing more and nothing less. She is direct but eloquent, compelling while respectful, a woman and a force to be reckoned with.
Works Cited
"Clinic shootings interpreted - shooting and killing of two women's health clinic workers in Brookline, Massachusetts, December 30, 1994". Christian Century. Jan 18, 1995. FindArticles.com. 30 Oct. 2007. <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n2_v112/ai_16412631>.
McManus, Terry. Marge Piercy – Biography. Oak Web Works. 2005. Marge Piercy. 30 Oct. 2007. <http://margepiercy.com/main-pages/biography.htm>
Piercy, Marge. What are Big Girls Made of?. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1997.