Lady Of The Beasts
Poems
Robin Morgan’s important second volume of poetry and the follow-up to Monster—the work of a woman mature in her craft.
Random House (cloth and paperback), 1976
Open Road Integrated Media, 2016
“Robin Morgan’s Lady Of The Beasts is even better than her first book, the controversial, stirring Monster . . . ‘The Covenant’ is a formally perfect poem, with its insistent tetrameter iambs and alternate slant rhymes. Morgan’s work is irresistibly energetic and absorbing. In ‘The Network of the Imaginary Mother,’ the parallel syntax, the catalogues, the yoking together of disparate elements, and the unflinching grip on life itself recall Whitman, the figure behind much of the best poetry written in our time. Robin Morgan will one day be regarded as one of our first-ranking poets.” POETRY
Robin Morgan’s second collection of poems is a rich tapestry of female experience, both literal and mythic.
Daughter, wife, mother, lover, artist, and even priestess are all here in shorter lyrics that cluster around four subjects: blood ties, activism and art, love between women, and archetypes. But Morgan surpasses the political grief and rage she delineated in Monster, her acclaimed first book of poems—especially in the four major metaphysical poems here: “The City of God,” balancing grace and despair; “Easter Island,” on the ironies of transcendence in embattled love; “The Network of the Imaginary Mother,” which became a virtual anthem of the women’s movement; and “Voices from Six Tapestries,” inspired by the famous Lady and the Unicorn weavings that hang in the Musée de Cluny in Paris.
Themes of familial love and hurt, mortality, survival, and transformation inform the poems collected here as the author weaves a wise and powerful self into being. Lady of the Beasts is Robin Morgan at her most lyrical yet.