The Volcano Sequence

It is impossible to decide whether these gorgeous poems are erotic or spiritual. They pour out from under Alicia Ostriker's scholarship on the Old Testament, but their inspiration is older than that, and newer than that—as if Ariadne had been reborn during World War II, reborn to write poems. This is a beautiful book, her finest work ever.

Her writing is light and supple, the lines deceptively simple. But behind the everyday images, there's a stunning depth of experience, passion and learning. ... As a psalmist of the intellect, the body and the spirit, she is without peer.

the volcano sequence is one of the those poems the world of literature occasionally has the good fortune to receive which doesn't so much sum up a life, as embody it. Ostriker's spiritual consciousness is abundant, complex, she has many moral sympathies and many symbolic selves to enact her curiosities and compassion. Her ruminations and ethical queries range from the world of the bible, to India, classical Greece and most urgently to our own imperfect dominion, as it is lived in the mind and the body, in passion and despair. This is a poem with a voice of its own; it is a prayer to God, and a hymn of accusation for the lapses of divinity; it is a psalm of praise for the life of the flesh, and a mourning for life's fleetingness. Most importantly, Ostriker finds, and offers us, a heartening solace in the rigor of her regard.

Ostriker is our morning-after psalmist; our wild, justice-starved, embodied, dazzling intelligence in its unending argument with itself, the world, and God. And she is our latter-day Ariadne: hers the "red thread" of the living blood line— entrails, tradition, umbilicus— what tethers us to all our sources— pulsing, torn and essential connection. And these poems, in their sustained, incremental power, deliver what our Biblical and poetic tradition failed to offer us: after great struggle, a daughter's at-onement with her mother.

This is a book written in white-hot passion, the kind of book that enters the writer perhaps once in a lifetime, and its synthesis of intellect and eros, historicism and contemporaneity, make it a major achievement. When Garbo went unannounced to visit Eric von Stroheim one afternoon, he said, 'Greta! Please come in and never leave.' After reading 'the volcano sequence,' you want to say, 'Ostriker! Please write like this forever.' ... In American spiritual poetry, there is nothing to match its sweep and power until you go back to Emily Dickinson writing in the 1860s. This is a book to be cherished, written about, argued over, read and reread for years.

... complex, original, and written with a truly literate and skilled economy of words. 'the volcano sequence' is a compilation of verse that fully showcases Ostriker a master poet in the full vigor of her imagination and wordsmithing talent.

Every year, I try to recommend a book of poetry, and this year I've found a great one: Alicia Suskin Ostriker's 'the volcano sequence. A mature, philosophical, yet playful voice comes through in these tight poems . . .Intense and profound, these poems also dazzle with surprising imaginery. . .

Ostriker's newest book is a medittion on what is held worthy of worship.""Ostriker has unearthed ancient mysteries and cleaned them up with modern, precise and unadorned language.

What does American Jewish poetry sound like? At its best, it can sound like Alicia Suskin Ostriker . . . For the reader, who has come dangerously close to the volcano, who has followed through questions and answers, there is a sense of accomplishment, of breathing out, but also a feeling of pleasure, of having heard a series of difficult but beautiful songs."