The Land of Milk and Honey

Sarah Getty’s poems represent the work of the New Woman, as the nineteenth century called her, now middle-aged, with daughters, private lives, and weathered marriages–but no male figure steps forward in any overshadowing role. Meditating on her own experience of girlhood, marriage, and the mothering of a daughter, Getty combines a feminist sensibility with a profound sense of connection to the natural and mythic realms from which the forces of generation emerge. Her poems, centered in domestic suburbia, range outward through those ancient realms and backward through the history of her family’s women. Getty is concerned to explore the losses and absences of the spirit as rehearsed by the flesh, its old enemy and friend. In doing so she reveals a startling sense of humor, which is another way of saying that she has come to terms with reality. These poems–lively, thoughtful, autonomous–reflect her response to that reality.