Emily's Bread: Poems

Title: Emily's Bread: Poems
Author: Sandra M Gilbert
ISBN: 0393301508
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1984
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 108
Condition Note: Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description:

What is the daily bread of women? In these splendid poems, Sandra Gilbert imagines spiritual regeneration through the tradition pioneered by the two Emilys--Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë--who are her emblematic foremothers. At the same time, she sees the perils as well as the possibilities of change. The "loved walls" might fall, some "animal goddess in her skull" might destroy what is cherished along with what is oppressive. Tracing the anxieties of history, this book captures the female "daguerreotypes" that persist today and the "still lives" of many women. In so doing, the poet has created a wide variety of voices, including confessional accounts of her own experiences and visionary encounters: little vials of mother's blood in a bureau, a refrigerator that hums blessings like a "complicitous mother," a dressmaker's dummy sailing forward into a mirror--images that invoke vivid, revealing meditations on myth and domesticity. Yet these poems also celebrate the joys that should endure: love and friendship, "haloes of desire," a piece of Emily Dickinson's black cake. Of this book, Frank Bidart has said, "These are poems of self-definition that heal rather than exacerbate the dramas of gender none of us can escape. They reflect Sandra Gilbert's characteristic subtlety, freshness of invention and insight, generosity of spirit. I enthusiastically recommend this book."