The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998.

The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 by Alicia Suskin Ostriker University of Pittsburgh Press. 264 pages. $16.95 (paper).

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a political poet in the best sense. She is not afraid to name names or state her opinions, but her poems could never be seen as political essays in verse. They ramify too much; they leave too much open to interpretation. Bad political poetry--which we hear so much of at poetry slams these days--delivers complete, freeze-dried ideology: The reader need only add the meager water of assent. Ostriker puts the reader to work, and she blenches at nothing that experience offers up.

This is evident even in Ostriker's early poems, like "The Leaf Pile," where the speaker, picking up her son at day care, in a hurry to get home and frustrated because he is dawdling, "playing with leaves/in his mind," sees him put something in his mouth after she expressly forbade him to, and strikes out in anger: "I have shaken him, I have pried the sweet from his cheek/I have slapped his cheek like a woman slapping a carpet/with all my strength."

It's a shocking moment--all the more so because the poet makes no attempt to seek aesthetic cover for its ugliness. She sets out the facts in uncluttered language, and where we might expect to read "with all her strength," Ostriker claims responsibility: "with all my strength."

This will to confront experience often leads Ostriker beyond her personal life. She writes powerfully about the Holocaust, the war in Vietnam, and mythology. Consider her poem "The Exchange," from A Woman Below the Surface (1982):

   I am watching a woman swim below the surface Of the canal, her powerful
   body shimmering, Opalescent, her black hair wavering Like weeds. She does
   not need to breathe. She faces

   Upward, keeping abreast of our rented canoe. Sweet, thick, white, the
   blossoms of the locust trees Cast their fragrance. A redwing blackbird
   flies Across the sluggish water. My children paddle.

   If I dive down, if she climbs up into the boat, Wet, wordless, she will
   strangle my children And throw their limp bodies into the stream. Skin
   dripping, she will take my car, drive home.

   When my husband answers the doorbell and sees This magnificent naked woman,
   bits of sunlight Glittering on her pubic fur, her muscular Arm will
   surround his neck, once for each insult

   Endured. He will see the blackbird in her eye, Her drying mouth incapable
   of speech, And I, having exchanged with her, will swim

   Away, in the cool water, out of reach.

A basic feminist reading comes across immediately: The poet dreams of a "powerful" double, who will avenge "each insult" of her husband, and also destroy her children, the products of her apparently corrupted marriage. But the poem doesn't gloss so easily. Why the careful observations that the woman "doesn't need to breathe," and is "wordless," "incapable of speech"? As with much of Adrienne Rich's poetry, "The Exchange" may have its genesis in a kind of feminist sensibility, but it would be impossible to boil it down to a political statement. I think there is a complicated ambivalence in this poem--a sense of being caught between action and language--that can't easily be paraphrased. When a poet talks about being rendered speechless, it's almost never a good thing. The speaker does seem enchanted with the power of this vengeful alter-ego, but also seems to fear the possibility of its violence replacing speech--the poet's stock-in-trade.

Ostriker has an amazing knack for describing those bewildering moments when our assumptions crash to pieces against actual experience. In "The War Between Men and Women," from The Imaginary Lover (1986), a "talented young man, a poet/Whom I love" comes to Ostriker for help. His marriage is in trouble; his wife "won't come across" sexually. Ostriker is furious, "in a rage against my sex," because she sees that the woman is using sex to manipulate her husband. But she is also furious at the sexist institutions--"The trousseau, the dowry,/The laws of property,/The entrance into the village/Of the army"--that have forced women to think of sex as their one trump card: "her mother's mother told her: Use this power,/Honey, it's all you got." The poet wrestles with herself for eight pages, disgusted by how puny the young man's problem seems when compared with more profound injustices, but persistently, even to her own irritation, unable to dismiss his pain.

For me, Ostriker's masterpieces are "The Mastectomy Poems," a series from The Crack in Everything (1996). As the twelve sections follow the course of her illness, from its discovery to the aftermath of a mastectomy, we see the poet shocked, grateful, humorous, terrified, brave, philosophical, and angry, but always attentive. Henry James said a writer is someone on whom nothing is lost. Even in the midst of her ordeal, Ostriker closes her eyes to nothing. She sees that "a husband's hand plays with a ring" on the drive to the hospital. She sees the discomfort of friends and reminds herself to "never say/The thing that is forbidden to say,/Piece of meat, piece of shit." Even the removed breast becomes present again as she imagines it in a poem addressed to her surgeon: "Was I succulent? Was I juicy?"

The Little Space provides an excellent introduction to the work of America's most fiercely honest poet.

Joel Brouwer is the recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing. His first book of poems, "Exactly What Happened," is forthcoming from Purdue University Press.