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

• Author: Brouwer, Joel
• Position: Review

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...