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by: Marge Piercy
List Price: $16.00Amazon.com's Price: $12.00 You Save: $4.00 (25%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780375704314
ISBN: 0375704310
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: September 19, 2000
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: September 19, 2000
Sales Rank: 101083
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, by Marge Piercy, is that rare book of self-avowedly religious poetry whose devotional purpose actually enhances its poetic strength. Piercy's poems, organized in chapters with thematic headings like 'Family,' 'Marriage,' and 'Prayer,' are plainly presented as help for living. Readers will turn to poems such as 'Putting the Good Things Away' when they need inspiration for understanding their self-sacrificing mothers. Yet Piercy's devotions are real poems with a literary integrity whose strength and beauty are free of sentimentality. They are also like liturgy, because they make room for readers to experience new aspects of contemporary life while simultaneously offering the security of very old frameworks for perceiving life. The Jewish themes of these poems are sometimes overt (as in 'Chuppah'), but they are often more subtle (as in 'The Art of Blessing the Day'). Throughout, they evince the careful balance of faithful attention to worldly life and the humble consideration of cosmic order that distinguishes Judaism among Western religions. 'Attention is love,' Piercy writes in the title poem, 'what we must give / children, mothers, fathers, pets, / our friends, the news, the woes of others. / What we want to change we curse and then / pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can / with eyes and hands and tongue. If you / can't bless it, get ready to make it new.' --Michael Joseph Gross
Product Description:
Winner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize
About Marge Piercy's collection of her old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: 'The Art of Blessing the Day is an exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and daughter poems, fierce and emotional, with their intense ambivalence, pain and joy, themes of separation and reconnecting, are among the very strongest about that difficult relationship.
'These striking, original, beautifully sensuous poems do just that. Ordinary moments--a sunset, a walk, a private religious ritual--are so alive in poems like 'Shabbat moment' and 'Rosh Hodesh.' In the same way that she celebrates ordinary moments, small things become charged with memories and feelings: paper snowflakes, buttons, one bird, a bottle-cap flower made from a ginger ale top and crystal beads.
'She celebrates the body in rollicking, gusto-filled poems like 'Belly good' and 'The chuppah,' where 'our bodies open their portals wide.' So much that is richly sensuous: 'hands that caressed you, . . . untied the knot of pleasure and loosened your flesh till it fluttered,' and lush praise for 'life in our spines, our throats, our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.'
'I love the humor in poems like 'Eat fruit,' the nostalgia and joy in 'The rabbi's granddaughter and the Christmas tree,' the fresh, beautiful images of nature--'In winter . . .the sun hangs its wizened rosehip in the oaks.'
'I admire Piercy's sense of the past alive in the present, in personal and social history. The poems are memorials, like the yahrtzeit candle in a glass. 'We lose and we go on losing,' but the poems are never far from harsh joy, the joy that is 'the wine of life.'
'Growing up haunted by Holocaust ghosts is an echo throughout the book, and some of the strongest poems are about the Holocaust, poems that become the voices of those who had no voice: 'What you carry in your blood is us, the books we did not write, music we could not make, a world gone from gristle to smoke, only as real now as words can make it.'
'Marge Piercy's words make such a moving variety of experiences beautifully and forcefully real.'
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Treasures
Marge Piercy's poems are all treasures, many people know that. Here though are particular, specific treasures that relate to her Judaism. Especially poignant and full.
Easiest though, and most precious to me, are the ones available to each of us for our own siddur of our creation. Her Nishmat is, itself alone, priceless. For instance.
Unique and invaluable!
Rating: - It takes skill, practice and our attention
Marge Piercy's poems are made of the substance and stuff of life. The taste of a fresh peach, the joy of picking the first garden tomato, become sources and places of contact with the mystery of creation and the Creator! However,it takes a disciplined eye that has time to pay attention to the detail of ordinary daily events to see something eternally extraordinary. !!Piercy's has the eyes to see , the mind to imagine and the skill to tell us where, and how to look!
Rating: - "The Discipline of Blessings"
Among the many blessings to be found in American literature and poetry are the works of American-Jewish writers. Jewish-American poets have been celebrated in two recent anthologies: Telling and Remembring edited by Rubin and Jewish-American Poetry edited by Barron and Sellinger. Ever since Emma Lazarus, writing in the late 19th Century, the poetry written by American Jewish women have played a large part in this literature.
Marge Piercy may well be the best of the Jewish-American poets ... Read More
Rating: - A true surprising gem!
Since there are already some long reviews of this book, I will just make one specific comment. On reading about the book, a person could get the idea that these are poems for Jews & Jews alone. The publisher leads one to think that. However, even though the poems are thoroughly Jewish, they can be enjoyed by people of any religious background, including athiests such as myself. Marge Piercy transends the genre her publisher tries to confine her in, being a brilliant poet of incredible depth & ... Read More
Rating: - In Praise of the Passion and Beauty in "The Art of..."
I've just finished reading "The Art Of Blessing The Day" for the third time, and every time I read it, I discover something new. There is so much depth and so many levels of meaning that each reading seems like the first for me. It's such a rich, marvelous collection that it's almost impossible to convey how much it affected me. She composed it like a piece of music. Each section has its theme, and moves from poem to poem with so much variation and skill. There's a gorgeous rhythm to her work ... Read More
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