Rising Venus: Poems

With Rising Venus Kelly Cherry reveals the fearsome beauty, vulnerability, and complexity of women's experience. Cherry masterfully re-creates the full spectrum of the female psyche, from looming madness to harrowing self-knowledge made bearable, even exhilarating, through the poet's remarkable range and skill.

The book's journey is an ascension from mysterious and overwhelming depths of despair and anguish to a place of peace and perspective. Beginning with "Adult Ed. 101: Basic Home Repair for Single Women," Cherry asserts, "Ladies, you are about to find out / just how much really rough / weather / your house can take." Probing the emotional extremes of woman's life as daughter, mother, wife, lover, and working woman, poems like "Lady Macbeth on the Psych Ward" open a frightening chasm beneath the reader, yet steady and reassure with the bravura of poetic compression. That fearless art inhabits the role of "An Other Woman" and then explores the status of woman as aesthetic object, whether of the male gaze, cultural perception, or her own observation: "she sees the long-haired girl she used to be, / in boots and mini-dress, apart and watchful / as in a redoubt, in a room in a painting in / a room, or as if in a poem turned inside out" ("The Model Looks at Her Portrait: A Retrospective").

A passionate turbulence gives way to acute and delicate observations on art and myth and strikingly original insights into tradition and context. Thus, in "Sunrise," "A sky as blue as if it were / The backdrop for a Renaissance / View of the Ascension" becomes a representation of that miracle, itself figured by the miracle of dawn, "a morning / Risen from the night." The title poem revises the classic view of Venus to speak of another miraculous ascension, a woman's hard- earned rise into her own sense of self: "Myth is the portal / through which we pass, / becoming human at last, / rising out of dream / and desire to realms / of reality, where love, / a woman, by Jove, / survives, strong and free, / engendering her own destiny."