as some women love jewels, love the jewels of life
"All the poems in this collection," Diane Wakoski writes, "describe the ongoing process of discovering beauty and acquiring an aesthetic sensibility via food"--seeing and savoring it, cooking and sharing it, reaching out to all creation and drawing it in, devouring it, lapping it up, literally becoming one with it. In the title poem, chosen by Adrienne Rich for inclusion in Best American Poetry, the poet recalls an early memory of delight in pure color--"Red stains on a clean white bib. . . crimson blood on canvas." Blood and crisp cotton as ink and paper, bread and wine as flesh and blood, the meal as art and as sacrament--this is the stuff of The Butcher's Apron, a feast for lovers of "the jewels of life."
Reviewing The Collected Greed Parts 1-13 (Black Sparrow, 1984) in the Los Angeles Times, critic Kenneth Funsten heralded Diane Wakoski as "a mature poet, unimpressed by obfuscation or autobiography for their own sakes, but intent upon illuminating substance".
That same clarity of vision and illuminating substance pervades this "new and selected" volume, which gathers together the long awaited "Greed: Part 14" along with all Wakoski's poems "written over the years concerning food and drink", as the poet explains in her introduction, "and the beauty that I have discovered through these subjects".
Plath imagined blood red tulips in white hospitals as I think of Georgia O'Keefe's poppies. My mother who voted for Nixon and hates foreigners dreams of those red and white cans which might hold Chicken Noodle or Tomato soups. She's never heard of Andy Warhol who mimicked such cans, just as a butcher I talked to in our Michigan supermarket said that he had never eaten shrimp, or knew what people did with oxtails. His apron too had the same bright red stains, not yet faded into rust. Crimson blood on canvas, the art of childhood. Unhealed scars, still capable of bleeding.
Contemplating her past -- "the exploration of Diane through her Western beach girl persona, her Medea-life, to her final snaky Medusa self" -- Wakoski honestly confronts her "Greed for Purity", comes to terms with "aging, living in the Midwest", and learns, "partly through the aesthetics of food and drink, to live a kind of 'still-life.'"
"Wakoski is a dedicated independent. . .self-mythologizing, autobiographically grounded, at her strongest when most self-consciously outspoken. b>The Butcher's Apron: New and Selected Poems may lift her above her cult constituency."--Publishers Weekly
"Dipping into this volume is like sticking your finger into a pot of honey. Highly recommended."--Library Journal
