Review by New York Times Review
With this collection, Grace Paley ends as she began, as a poet. TAKE this quiz. Was Grace Paley, who died in 2007 at 84, (a) a poet or (b) a fiction writer? The answer is (c) a dramatist. Both in the stories that made her famous and in her little-known poems, Paley most often wrote in voices - essentially, dramatic monologues and dialogues. Many speakers in her fiction had some Yiddish in their heads (as did she; her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants to Manhattan's Lower East Side), although she could evoke Irish-inflected speech with charming accuracy, too. Her best stories, often so short and telegraphic you could call them sketches, imparted theatrical vividness, as if talented actors were performing them. Paley had the playwright's gift, as well, of manifesting her imagery, not just verbalizing it. In the story "Faith in a Tree," for instance, the narrator's point of view is literally from on high. We're at a playground, where Faith Darwin, an oxymoronically-named mother (and recurrent Paley character), assumes an amusingly godlike vantage on everyone else: "I am sitting on the 12-foot-high, strong, long arm of a sycamore, my feet swinging." A symbolic tree has been set onstage, and we don't demand a real one. The nature description here is about as elaborate as we ever get in Paley. Self-consciously beautiful writing is not what she's after: people, after all, don't talk that way. In a preface to her 1994 "Collected Stories," Paley recounted her seismic genre-shift in the 1950s. She had written poetry since childhood, but "I was beginning to feel the storyteller's pain: Listen! I have to tell you something! I simply hadn't known how to do it in poetry." A perfectly good argument can be made that the story-writer Paley, who went on making poems until her last days, wasn't a "real" poet. (She studied briefly at the New School with a great one - W.H. Auden - whose influence is wholly undetectable in her work.) Adept enough at rhyme and meter, she could provide believable lyrics ostensibly written by the taxicab driver/ pop song writer in the title story of her collection "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" : "I will call you and together / We will cuddle up and see / What the weather's like in Key West / On the old-age home TV." And yet her best poetry can usually be described simply as economical, convincing speech that breaks into roughly rhythmic lines. She employs few formal techniques; when she tries devices like alliteration, for instance, she tends to overdo them: "uprooted storm-thrown hemlock/ (hurricane of 'thirty-eight) a humped/ and heaving graveyard." That quotation is from "Fidelity," her final book, and in it Paley reproduces with touching fidelity what it is to be old, and sick, and missing one's vanished friends, and philosophical up to a point - but unwilling to part with dear life. The authenticity of her response to experience, which includes political protest (she never stopped being a liberal activist, even on the page), remains winning as ever. I was surprised how much I liked a poem such as "The Hard-Hearted Rich," for instance, which in its last lines rises above its tired premise. After refusing smugly to give coins to beggars, at the end of the day the rich in their beds "decide to try / love as a kind of heart softener / they are tired and think to try love." Those odd blank gaps within lines, a frequent choice in Paley's verse, and her paucity of capitalization and punctuation, create a somewhat E. E. Cummings effect; but then Cummings owed much to Emily Dickinson. Where Dickinson used capitals and dashes to create unexpected pauses, and thus to heighten meaning, Paley uses lowercase letters and white space. It's hard not to hear Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you? / Are you - Nobody - too?" behind Paley's untitled poem that begins "before I was nobody / I was me after / I was nobody I / was me." To know your identity, you must presumably be equipped with memory; but here we have a self-aware poetry of old age in which loss of memory is accepted for what it becomes - a new facet of one's identity. "On Occasion" begins: I forget the names of my friends and the names of the flowers in my garden my friends remind me Grace it's us the flowers just stand there stunned by the sun The minimal capitalization and punctuation allows the author's own name, and the power of the word Grace, to leap off the page. And the friends whose names are at least "on occasion" forgotten are renamed by way of the set-apart, intimate phrase "it's us." To distinguish speakers in her fiction, Paley often favored an initial long dash, rather than quotation marks, and sometimes she provided no indication at all, not even "he said" or "she said." Such techniques are inherently poetic, if we take intentional ambiguity as one of poetry's hallmarks. Paley's poem "I Met a Woman on the Plane" (its childlike title is knowingly naïve) conveys the speaker's empathetic identification with a stranger's story: I liked her a lot she'd had five children no she'd had six one died at twenty-three days Who's making the correction "no she'd had six" - the author or her new friend? The remaining lines make the answer only less clear, and better for that. Most of the poems in "Fidelity" aren't as successful as those quoted here. Yet they consistently appeal in their wry but heartfelt voices, their dramatization of the human condition. In the title poem, Paley salutes (with strong echoes of Dickinson's meters and vocabulary) the pleasure of reading fiction: the characters were now my troubled companions I knew them understood I could reenter these lives without loss so firm my habitation Speaking now to us from the grave, Paley is writer, character, actor - a wise companion. Though offstage, her voice seems likely to be heard a long while. Mary Jo Salter is the author of "A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems." She is a professor in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
A park-bench writer who heard the music of the heart in everyday conversations, and perceived the epic struggle between good and evil in the humblest of lives, Paley infused her short stories, essays, and poems with ready compassion, forthright indignation, and peppery humor. A quintessential New Yorker, she absorbed lessons in the art of being human from the city's endless improvisation on survival. Family life fascinated, appalled, and sustained her, and her time in Vermont deepened her appreciation for the life force. Paley completed her final poetry collection at age 84, not long before her death, in August 2007, and the perspective, wisdom, and ironies of age salt every line. She never ceased to pay attention to the world, or to praise progress, however wryly: Fathers are / more fathering / these days they have / accomplished this by / being more mothering. Nor did Paley stop protesting war and greed: Oh how hard the hard-hearted rich are. Her poems are pithy, aphoristic, conversational, offhandedly beautiful, and right-on as Paley expresses her fidelity to honesty and connection: A person should be in love most of / the time. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When she died this summer at age 84, Paley was widely and rightly remembered as a master of the American short story, an engage raconteur who mixed earthly humor, Jewish-American heritage, outspoken feminism, antiwar activism and an understated postmodern self-awareness. Those facets did not all appear in Begin Again (2001), a collected poems praised more for honesty than craft; happily, Paley's many fans may find that her best poems were her last. The wry, friendly voices in this posthumous assemblage address her later years with equanimity and humor. As in her short stories, the apparent naivete of tone plays off the earned wisdom the teller finally conveys. In "I Met a Woman on the Plane," Paley listens to a mother of five living children explain that she cannot stop grieving for her sixth, who died. Other poems praise the territories Paley has known, with wit and kindness: Manhattan and Brooklyn streets and the hills of Vermont. Finally, though, this wise and patient collection focuses on old age, presented with an appealing combination of impatience and fortitude: "Anyone who gets to be/ eighty years old says thank you/ to the One in charge," Paley says, "and then im-/ mediately begins to complain." (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"Life is as risky/ as it is branchy/ treetop and twigtip/ are only the beginning." Just before her death in 2007 at the age of 84, Paley compiled this smart, engaging collection. Rich with memories of family and friends, evocations of rural Vermont and her hometown of New York City, and assertions of clear-headed social convictions, these poems are sometimes melancholy, sometimes funny, and sometimes simply a pleasure. Finding herself at odds with aging-"I forget the names of my friends/ and the names of the flowers in/ my garden"-Paley shows us here she was nevertheless in continued and absolute control of her faculties. She was known as a none-too-shy advocate of peace and justice, especially in the everyday, and these poems are in keeping with her fine-tuned values: "Oh how hard the hard-hearted rich are/ when they meet a working person in their places/ of work a cab or restaurant kitchen." A fitting legacy for a wise and delightful writer; highly recommended for all collections.-Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
