Circles on the Water by Marge Piercy (1982)

This is a very thick and large trade size paperback.  Same cover shown.  Condition is used but good condition.  NO HIGHLIGHTS, UNDERLINES, MARGIN NOTES, OR OTHER MARKINGS IN THE BOOK.  Only a very small and light little stain at the corner top/bottom of the first two pages where a name is also blackened out.  Tiny bit of a fan at that top corner to cover/first couple pages.  That's the only defect in the book I can find.  Nice cover with no spine crease. 

MARGE PIERCY WRITES ABOUT HER POETRY SELECTED FOR CIRCLES ON THE WATER.  (from back cover).

Usually the voice of the poem is mine.  The experiences, however, are not always mine, and although my major impulse to augobiography has played itself out in poems rather than novels, I have never made a distinction between working up my own experience and other people's.  When I am writing, I am not aware of the difference, to be honest.  I suppose that is why I have never considered myself a confessional poet.  In either case I am often pushing the experience beyond realism. 

I imagine that I speak for a constituency, living and dead, giving utterance to energy, insight, words flowing from many lives.  I have always desired that my poems work for others, be useful. 

What I mean by useful is simply that readers will find poems that speak to and for them, will take those poems into their lives and say them to each other and put them up on the bathroom wall and remember bits and pieces in stressful or quiet moments.  That the poems may give voice to something in the experience of a life has been my intention.  To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses.  We can hear what we hope for and what we most fear, in the small release of cadenced utterance.  We have few rituals that function for us in the ordinary chaos of our lives. 

I have readers who love my poems about the Cape, about zucchini and lettuce and tomatoes, and simply skip or tune out the poems about an old working-class woman lying in a nursing home or about nuclear power.  Then I have readers who love the poems they call feminist or political, but ask me why I wrote about a blue heron or oak trees. 

I have to confess, for me it is all one vision. 

COVER DESIGN BY VIRGINIA TAN. 

ALFRED A. KNOPH, PUBLISHER. FIRST EDITION, 1982.

I ACCEPT PAYPAL ONLY.  THANKS FOR LOOKING AND HAPPY BIDDING.