Mothersongs: Poems For, By, and about Mothers

With little of the sentimentality its title forewarns, this vibrant, provocative anthology explores the varied dimensions of maternity. Gilbert and Gubar (who collaborated on The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women) and O'Hehir, a poet and novelist, have arranged their razor-edged selections into 12 thematic sections--from birthing to sons' and daughters' remembrances of their mothers. The final section, ``Conceiving the Mother: Meanings of Maternity,'' begins with Walt Whitman's ``Unfolded Out of the Folds'' and ends breathtakingly with Sharon Olds's ``The Language of the Brag,'' where the speaker claims, ``I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman/ ...with the exceptional heroic body/ this giving birth, this glistening verb....'' In styles spanning from ballad to prose poem, from John Donne's 17th-century metaphysics to the contemporary confessionalism of Anne Sexton and Diane Wakoski, this collection of 200 poems illuminates so many angles of its subject that the overall effect is dazzling. (May)