Women’s Poetry

The title poem in Fried's dazzling new collection begins 'I, too, dislike it. / However,' and skips down a full stanza before completing the line and lavishly describing a tricked-out Nissan G-TR emerging from a garage. The patently masculine sight sparks an unexpected epiphany in the speaker about desire. In the potent blank spaces between 'However' and the rush of the second stanza, Fried displays her gift for honoring hesitation not as a feminine quirk but more as a necessary pause before reaching enlightenment and sometimes even ecstasy. Fried ponders pregnancy, Italian art, frustrating adjunct teaching jobs, Stendahl, and Henry Kissinger. The final section, 'Ask the Poetess: An Advice Column,' shows wit and range worthy of playwright Wendy Wasserstein. In one of the most memorable exchanges, the oracular, tongue-in-cheek poetess is asked why people write confessional poetry when they could just 'go to church and confess.' With irony and equanimity, she responds, 'In church confession, Catholics confess their sins. In confessional poetry, persons of all faiths confess how others have sinned against them.'

The poetry of Daisy Fried practices for a for-real poetry verite; Fried loves the rough, tumbling texture of vernacular impressionism, all the quirks and idiomatic pell-mell of spoken consciousness. Her poetic voice—long-striding, unpretentious, unsentimental—is anchored by a rock-solid, almost rude, recurrent honesty, intimate as a punch in the arm. The result of Fried's vigorous, forward-rushing style, her passionate and tender social acumen, and her blunt, sensible clarity is a poetry more convincingly in touch with the lived life than almost anyone else's. I go back to her books over and over.

'I, too, dislike it'. Daisy Fried's witty take on Women's Poetry isn't what you'd expect. This isn't the grapey communion wine of the sisterhood, but a galling, and galvanic, and gimlet-eyed appraisal of human behavior across a panoply of contexts. To my ear, what Fried does with the American vernacular is matchless: She infuses it with the savage energy that William Carlos Williams was looking for a century ago when he wrote despairingly, 'We believe that life in America is compact of violence and the shock of immediacy. This is not so. Were it so, there would be a corresponding beauty of the spirit, to bear it witness.' Here is a woman who strides across a moonlit back lawn to feed feral kittens she has named Raphael, Gabriel, and Lucifer. Such are the revamped angels in the house of women's poetry. To which I say Amen.

'She was tired of sad modern endings. . . . She narrated things calmly and swiftly,' Daisy Fried writes, as her steely narration, calm and swift, dismantles our expectations for poetries that address gender, class, motherhood, politics, and poetries. In 'sourness a kind of joy,' she asserts, and throughout this stunning collection demonstrates this over and again, most strikingly in the beautiful braidings of 'Attenti Agli Zingari.' These poems end as they begin: fiercely, frankly, getting the last word: 'scomplicated.'

Passionate, nervy (as in 'you've got a lot of . . . '), telegraphic, indecorous, chewy, sharply observed, and smart; this is decidedly not Kathie Lee's America we're encountering in Daisy Fried's wonderful new collection. Off come the pink happy goggles and on come the lights. Be unsettled, it's quite all right. Women's Poetry is bold, joyfully energetic poetry, and most invigorating, even if you're a guy.

Lyrical, idiosyncratic, electrically gifted, no one writes quite like Daisy Fried, perhaps not even Daisy Fried. The poems come at you with flailing elbows, blurted youthspeak mashed-up with Italianate parlor musings, a unique conjury of angles, rhythms, and rhetorical postures, aswerve, aslant, aflutter, akimbo. This third book extends her range to the long sequence, the epistolary pseudo-poem, and heaven knows what else: don't think too hard, buy it.

Fried is one of the most engaging contemporary poets writing today, for she is as thoughtful, witty or wise as the best conversationalists. Yet, like two of her favorite poets, Charles Bukowski and Frank O'Hara, her utter lack of self-consciousness allows her to develop a unique connection with her readers, an intimacy that some poets would cut off their writing hands to replicate. . . .In every one of these poems there is the trademark Fried voice, sure and recognizable as a close confidante who manages to provide you with a slice of life by the way she fractures the story-line and interlineates her reactions and impressions. . . . .For those who like readable, funny, intensely honest poetry, it doesn't get much better than this.

Whether she's portraying college seniors ('fifteen responsible children . . . in attitudes of surrender'), Kissinger 'befuddled by culpability,' an Iraq War protest in Rome (naming ourselves/Tourists Against the War'), the 'poetess' as advice columnist, or her own pregnancy ('The worst discomforts . . . self-pity.'), National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist Fried is devastatingly on target and funny in a way that can make you blanch.

Daisy Fried displays an intense and refined attention to the troubles of the present moment. Effectively blending the personal with the more universal, she delves into issues surrounding womanhood, but also looks at the troubles of humanhood. . . . British literary critic F. R. Leavis insists on a poetry in touch with its time. . . . Daisy Fried has mastered this, as her poems successfully reflect the contemporary climate.