Upstairs In The Garden
Poems Selected and New 1968–1988
This rich volume features a substantial number of new poems as well as work selected from four of Robin Morgan’s previously published books of poetry.
W.W. Norton & Company, 1990
“The development of Morgan’s artistry is everywhere evident. Work from her early feminist days is filled with rage at the powerlessness of women . . . But as the pages turn, a new universality of concern and sureness of voice take hold . . . Lyricism and fresh technical discoveries proclaim new accomplishment in a ‘lavish larkspur song . . . with a passion / for daily use’.” —PUBLISHERS’ WEEKLY
“Morgan fulfills the three requirements for good poetry . . . to teach, to delight, and to arouse passion. An accomplished and original poet, she commands a wealth of technical resources, so evident in the formal poems, yet spilling over into her free verse. Each of her lines has an integrity of its own, a shape indistinguishable from the material embedded within it.” —POETRY
“Audacious, courageous, poignant, wry—Robin Morgan’s collection is all this and more. A large audience will welcome them. So will historians in the future who need to know what the poetry of this time and place was like.” —CATHARINE R. STIMPSON
Upstairs In The Garden: Poems Selected and New 1968-1988 demonstrates the wide range of her craft, from skill at such traditional forms as sonnet, villanelle, and elegy, through her more colloquial poems—including the contemporary classics “Monster,” “The Invisible Woman,” and “The Network of the Imaginary Mother”—which have been taken up by women as validation of the different reality in female experience, emblazoned on banners and posters, and quoted as feminist liturgy. The new works—fiery, ironic, wild yet disciplined love poems—resonate with the laser-like intensity familiar to Morgan’s readers, but also with a new, astringent sophistication that balances their vulnerability.