You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Strong Women’s Voices in Poetry
The four women writers featured in this section celebrate the great tradition of strong women poets. Their original voices are tough, blunt, and emotionally charged as they reflect on their life experiences.
Joan Cusack Handler ushers in the ghost of her mother and transforms her deep feelings and yearnings into a universal language.
Claire Basescu writes two short poems about midlife love and the therapy relationship. Rachel Berghash’s poem vividly evokes the shifting landscape of dreams. Maggie Bloomfield declares her independence in a raw and fearless poem about empowerment. Maggie presented this slam poem at Psychoanalytic Perspectives’s Creative Salon Talk Poetry to Me in March 2014.
Throughout history, women like Elizabeth Bishop, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickenson, and Sylvia Plath have breathed life and energy into this genre. In “Daddy,” one of the strongest poems ever written by a woman, Sylvia Plath uses apocalyptic metaphors to write about women kept in perpetual childhood by fathers and husbands. Plath expresses with increasing intensity the ambivalence of love and hate. “I was ten when they buried you./At twenty I tried to die /and get back, back, back to you./I thought even the bones would do.” It has been said that the poem itself is having a nervous breakdown.
On these next pages, we celebrate the tradition of writing from the feminine perspective.