Description

(The Word Works, 2022)

In a lifetime of prize-winning work, a poet invents many selves and voices. Barbara Goldberg doubles that by calling upon such a wide range of subject matter, from Medieval history, to her family of origin, to fairy tales, to current events. Women and men from throughout the ages dance, rage, and practice their genius and trickery upon one another throughout these rich and generous pages. Says Stephen Dunn, Barbara Goldberg likens the body to the earths crust, and adds, the deeper / the fault, the more it can hold. Its a line typical of her capacity for deep sympathy in poems that also manage to be ferocious with precise honesties. Goldberg turns away from nothing, and never separates herself from whats unattractive in us. Throughout I felt in the presence of embodied truth. Lucille Clifton exclaimed that her vivid imagery, her direct and forceful telling, help warn and counsel her readers. One envies her good eye and celebrates the voice that in its hunger for clarity speaks. While Naomi Shahib Nye calls Goldberg’s work a deep, indelible tonic to the soul, Stanley Kunitz praised the inventiveness of her mind and the brilliant assurance of her craft. David St. John concludes that Goldberg shows us how we sometimes choose to devourover and over again, often relishing their texturethose very wounds that have made us who we are and what we have come to believe.