With Rising Venus Kelly Cherry reveals the fearsome beauty, vulnerability, and complexity of women’s experience. Cherry masterfully re-creates the full spectrum of the female psyche, from looming madness to harrowing self-knowledge made bearable, even exhilarating, through the poet’s remarkable range and skill. The book’s journey is an ascension from mysterious and overwhelming depths of despair and anguish to a place of peace and perspective. Probing the emotional extremes of woman’s life as daughter, mother, wife, lover, and working woman, poems like Lady Macbeth on the Psych Ward open a frightening chasm beneath the reader, yet steady and reassure with the bravura of poetic compression. A passionate turbulence gives way to acute and delicate observations on art and myth and strikingly original insights into tradition and context. Thus, in Sunrise,
A sky as blue as if it were / The backdrop for a Renaissance / View of the Ascension becomes a representation of that miracle, itself figured by the miracle of dawn. The collection’s title poem revises the classic view of Venus to speak of another miraculous ascension, a woman’s hard-earned rise into her own sense of self: Myth is the portal / through which we pass, / becoming human at last, / rising out of dream / and desire to realms / of reality, where love, / a woman, by Jove, / survives, strong and free, / engendering her own destiny.