Depth Perception
New Poems and a Masque
An important departure for a poet already accomplished in the major modes of contemporary poetry.
Doubleday & Company/Anchor Paperback, 1994
Open Road Integrated Media, 2016
“‘The Duel: A Masque’ is a play we must stage here at The Public.”—Joseph Papp
This fourth book of poems from award-winning author Robin Morgan has an almost-novelistic shape, with plot twists that are realizations of self, other, and the nature of change
In this book of transitions, Robin Morgan’s poetry crosses the boundaries of age, race, culture, and gender. The lifelong love-hate passion between mother and daughter is here, as is a vivid, rhetoric-free depiction of the suffering and rage of women cross-culturally. Morgan also traces the slow dissolution of a marriage, parsed in poems of alternating hope and despair, humor and fury—and also in a tragicomic, two-character, one-act verse play, “The Duel: A Masque.” The play, which inverts the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, was performed at the Public Theater in New York City.
Praised by the literary world for her technique, but dedicated to keeping her craft accessible and impassioned, Morgan takes us through inevitable deaths and resurrections of the self in pitch-perfect language shot through with dazzling imagery and irony.