Emily’s Bread: Poems

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 Bronte–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.