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Epigraph
The danger in happiness. Now everything I touch turns
out to be wonderful: Now I love any fate that comes along.
Who would like to be my fate?
—Nietzsche
Contents
I. SUN-TRUTHS
Invisible Woman
The Stone Orchard
Nightless Nights
The Wasp
Last Things
Season of Peril
Baby
A Miniature Passion
Sun-Truths
The Mourning
The Mourning II
The Loss
Poem Jubilant in Place of Mourning
II. THE FORBIDDEN
The Forbidden
Honeymoon
There Are Northern Lakes . . . .
Tachycardiac Seizure
The Proofs of God
Another
Leavetaking, at Dusk
Night Driving, New Year's Eve
Betrayal
Good Morning
Query, Not To Be Answered
Appetite and Terror on the Wide White Sands of Western Florida
Psalm
Snowfall
Snow-Drunk in Ontario
Footprints
III. FIRST DARK
First Dark
Autistic Child, No Longer Child
Jesus, Heal Me
Back Country
First Death
Celestial Timepiece
F---
The Present Tense
IV. A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY
Ecstasy of Flight
Ecstasy of Motion
Boredom
Ecstasy of Boredom at the Berlin Wall
The Great Egg
The Child-Bride
High-Wire Artist
Homage to Virginia Woolf
A Report to an Academy
V. SELECTED POEMS 1970-1978
Abandoned Airfield, 1977
Dreaming America
Last Harvest
Visionary Adventures of a Wild Dog Pack
Fertilizing the Continent
After Terror . . . .
"Promiscuity"
The Suicide
Firing a Field
Shelley at Viareggio
Domestic Miracles
How Gentle
Skyscape
Ice Age
Afterword
Dust-Jacket Blurb
Joyce Carol Oates published her first collection of poems, Anonymous Sins, in 1969. The reviewers, who had long recognized her talent as a writer of prose fiction, were quick to see that she was equally talented as a poet. "At the very least," stated Library Journal, "Miss Oates is a major writer; she may already be a great one." Anonymous Sins was followed in the next decade by four more volumes, each representing a distinct advance in Oates's career as a poet: Love and Its Derangements (1970), Angel Fire (1973), The Fabulous Beasts (1975), and Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978). Invisible Woman brings together thematically appropriate earlier poems as a kind of coda to Oates's most recent gathering. In these poems exploring love, bereavement, the paradoxical nature of "invisibility," as well as other aspects of life, we hear a voice that is both detached and penetrating, analytical and passionate. Invisible Woman will firmly establish Joyce Carol Oates as a distinctive voice in contemporary poetry.
Excerpt
Celestial Timepiece
By squares, by inches, hour upon hour
the great quilts grew.
Serendipity and Felicity and All-Hallows-Eve
and Wonder-Working Providence and Milky Way
and Celestial Timepiece—plants, suns, fireballs, moons—
covering half a wall
like a conqueror's map.
The men, the husbands, drew up such maps.
Their strategy has always been maps.
Look at these massive wool-and-feather-lined quilts,
recording square by square these wondrous years—
1784, 1806, 1848—
Glass Garden survives though frayed, and Fools and Poppies,
and Gyroscope all aflame, of 1864.
Soldiers are always passing along the roads.
Soldiers, the dead, prisoners in churches.
A hospital in a churchyard, the women's fingers working,
1865, 1876, conquerors on horseback along the roads,
Butterflies and Christmas Eve and Jesus Our Savior.
Square by square, spilling to the floor.
Winter days when the sun was a brief parenthesis overhead.
Spring days when no letters came. No news.
Calla lilies for the dead, gowns for the infants,
sunflowers bawdy as the first day of Creation.
Years. Decades. Centuries. Rags
torn from sheets, torn from dresses and trousers,
here is the resurrection of the body!—in the quilt's soiled squares.
The men's maps too are tearing,
so often folded.
The soldiers, the dead.
The conquerors on horseback.
She takes your hand, Feel this, feel each square, she says,
do you understand?
So many textures, a Babel of textures--coarse wool, fine silk,
satin, lace, burlap, cotton, brocade, hemp, fussy pleats—
you close your eyes, Can you read it? she asks, Do you understand?
Here, an entire world stitched to perfection.
By squares, by inches. You are the child-witness.
Your fingers read it like Braille.
Reviews
Publisher's Weekly, March 12, 1982, p74-75
Library Journal, May 1, 1982, p892-893
Booklist, June 15, 1982, p1351
Parnassus, Spring 1983, p129
Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 1983, p646-648
World Literature Today, Autumn 1983, p638
Revised Sat, Mar 20, 1999
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