I don't remember if this happened in the book but the explanation of what inspired each poem was off-putting.

Compilation of previous books and overview of all her poetry. Covers several books I didn't have with new poetry to me that was comfortable reading.

Besides the witch poems everything is phenomenal and this deserves a five

This book discovered me when i was 16. It informed my life & my poetry & continues to do so. I have a signed copy that i cherish very much. When I met Erica I cried like a baby & thanked her for her work. Corny but true. Buy this book; you will NOT be sorry.

One of my favorite poetry books ever. She is able to illicit images and emotions through her words and thoughts. Probably some of the most sultry words in the most classy way...

Erica Jong's poetry is gorgeous. I've read many of her novels but it is her poetic side that I adore most of all.

There is an audio version of this title, with Erica Jong reading her own work, available for rent and download in the San Antonio Public Library's system. It's sort of a nice experience -- Jong sounds just like I would have imagined, earthy, funny, predictably egocentric, in the empathic way good teachers always are. But she's very chatty, and the story of her life running behind her poems ultimately detracts from the music she's made. The poems are prosaic just because of delivery.

It was a revelation, then, to look at the whole volume, and to read it off the page (or on my phone, anyway) away from Jong's audio tracks. The audio only covers a small portion of the total poems, and most of those of a single type, short-lined verse aphorisms, tiny portraits of experience:

The old self
like a dybbuk
clutching at my heel.
She wants to come back.

The skinny line poem doesn't come alive aloud, for the reader is stuck between leaving long pauses and just following the enjambment suggested by the syntax. It needs the negative space left on the page to do its work. This negative space charges up aphoristic endings which otherwise fall flat in audio reading:

If only we could all admit
that none of us belongs here,
that all of us are Martians,
and that our bedtimes
are always
too early
or


too late.

I also tried reading along as the audio played, listening to the whole track again a second time this way, and the visual definitely highlighted, or somehow created, spiritual energy to Jong's reading that I had not seen before.

I think I would truly love to do a writing workshop with Erica Jong, the wise earth mother goddess of the American middle class. The worst part of the audio edition of her work is just that she leaves out, not only many of her poems, but many types of poems, falsely leaving an impression that that skinny aphorism-verse is her only trick. Jong can write wonderfully atmospheric formal poems of experience, as in "Eveningsong at Bellosguardo:"

Tonight the unplucked lemons almost gleam.
And with their legs, the crickets harmonize.
The trees are rustling in uncertain hymn,
and unseen birds contribute trembling cries.
When did the summer censor choiring things?
We know the blood is brutal though it sings.

Sometimes she gives us concrete wit, visual in nature, reminiscent of e. e. cummings or William Carlos Williams:

2
O note the two round holes in onion.

There's also the epic "House-Hunting in the Bicentennial Year," a kind of forgiving, middle-class answer to Ginsberg's "Howl:"

America,
we have met your brokers.
They are fiftyish ladies in hairnets,
or fiftyish ladies in blue and silver like mink coats
or flirty fiftyish ladies
getting blonder every winter.
They tout your federal brickwork
& your random hand-pegged floorboards.
Like witches, they advertise your gingerbread houses,
your "high ranches," your split-levels, your Victorians, your widows' walks,
your whaling towns,
instead of wailing walls,
your Yankee New England spunk,
your hospitality, your tax rates,
your school systems,
with or without busing,
your friendly dogs
& philosophical cats.

Yes, I like this stanza for the cats.

Jong is also poet of reading. I love the longer lines of her "To James Boswell in London," for example:

I consort with books while you see men, haunt the shelves
where your London lies buried. Your book once opened,
I become the ghost, a pale phantom who delves...

A man should never live more than he can record
you say; but what if he records more than he lives?

The raw honesty here is enmeshed by the long lines fraught between form and feeling. And this is just one of many poems on the reading self, which I of course adore. Jong is Boswell, Keats, Neruda. She imbues with Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and Anne Sexton. She mourns and honors all the women poets passed before their time, like Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Wickham and Sylvia Plath.

By her own admission, Jong's poems are profoundly full of feminine imagery, like roundness, pregnancy, fruits, babies, wombs, caves, menstrual blood, red poppies and bougainvilleas. Etc. But there are also penises that stiffen and soften, by turns. She writes sex well, and shows us how to be a feminist without hating men; in fact, she's is as enthralled as Henry Miller with the "Land of Fuck,"

carrying bug-eyed
exhibitionists
and drooling
adolescent boys with perpetual
hard-ons,
the students of Fuck
go to spill their lives away
and the semen pools
under their luminous chairs.

One thinks of William S. Burroughs. Jong contains multitudes. There's even one poem in Italian, which my Italian friend says is cute and witty and shows great facility with the language. I read most of this book on morning walks to school, finding that Jong sets up a dreamy, distant feeling that truly does help with the stress of my job. Maybe it's poetry more generally that does the trick?

Love her writing, one of my faves. A lot of her poems hit home for me. Huge fan in big way, oxox to Erica Jong!

A good read

I love Erica Jong, and this collection of poetry does not disappoint. Jong's poetry is smart, sassy and shocking and are essentially about love: love of poetry, love of men, love of her life as a woman, and love of nature. She's outspoken and direct, she's unashamed, sensual and thought provoking. I've had this collection for over 10 years and still on a rainly afternoon, I will occasionnally pick it up and flip through it. Each time I do, I find something new, something honest, and something funny.

I love Erica Jong’s poetry. I’ve read her poems since high school, starting with hard covers of the original editions from the library. I was very pleased to see a Kindle edition of this collection. Unfortunately, there were many distracting typos that were not in the original poems. Jong’s work deserves better editing than this.

People who live by the sea
understand eternity.
They copy the curves of the waves,
their hearts beat with the tides,
& the saltiness of their blood
corresponds with the sea.

They know that the house of flesh
is only a sandcastle
built on the shore,
that skin breaks
under the waves
like sand under the soles
of the first walker on the beach
when the tide recedes.

Each of us walks there once,
watching the bubbles
rise up through the sand
like ascending souls,
tracing the line of the foam,
drawing our index fingers
along the horizon
pointing home.