The baby is with the father on the bed: she is no longer the child’s sole focus. She experiences a “pang” of ambivalence: “measureless pleasure? / Is it measureless pain?” The “other,” the husband, is virile: “the strong one.” The mother has been weakened by her day-to-day death-struggle with her baby boy; she endures “[h]our after beastly hour” of his “claw[ing] her “skin” and “nipple,” his “[s]cream,” being “confine[d]” by him, which transforms her into a “witch” who perceives him as a “[l]eech,” who wants him to “[d]ie.” Even as on the changing table she gives him every attention, she is taken aback by the “intense, impersonal… icy” “power” projected “through” his “staring eyes”: he is a tyrant, and has her heart: “the son of beauty, the bow bent, and the arrows drawn.” She is smitten by her baby boy, but both will survive; she will “be singing” of fine days with “blue sky” once all he has ravaged in her has regenerated: “when all the forests you have burned are green.”

The poem continues with a cascade of words that ironically suggest light and conviviality, but which call to mind the atmosphere surrounding the deaths of the protesters…

“I hold you, boy” she says, seemingly de-naming him in an attempt to distance herself from the pain of separation, as she “leave[s] him “a minute”; we recall that ten days before his birth, students had been shot dead by National Guardsmen, depersonalized as protesters. With their resolute double-line, the words “The Guard kneeled / The Guard kneeled” rip into the body of the poem like bullets. The poem continues with a cascade of words that ironically suggest light and conviviality, but which call to mind the atmosphere surrounding the deaths of the protesters: “bright,” “warm,” “la la,” “loud,” and “sweet”; then we are reminded of the shots, the slump of bodies: “one after the other / one after the other.” “All that is weak invites the brute,” the author warns us. She, too, must admit her violent phantasies vis-à-vis her infant, to “acknowledge my will / to murder the child, to wipe him like a spill from a counter” to be able to love without “chok[ing].” This shocking reality must be faced; we must not flinch. “Fear teaches nothing / that is my message,” she writes. However, there is the ever-present threat of disintegration: growth means “pain” and “division,” and leaves us “open” to “danger.” Being alive has responsibilities, including the search for unity: “consciousness” will only be a “blessing,” rather than a “curse,” if the child, when older, “seek[s]… a healing of division.”

In the poem “Letter to M” (p. 33), in “The Spaces” (pp. 31-58), the writer speaks out against the “sentimentality” of attributing to mothers “altruistically, self-sacrificing ‘maternal’ feelings, as if they did not enjoy themselves”: perhaps the “erotic pleasure of nursing” is “another love that dare not tell its name.” In “Song of the Abandoned One” (p. 34), beautiful things have been spoilt and are now repulsive: the biggest lily in the garden has broken, and “snails are on it.” It is “ugly,” and the writer “doesn’t care.” She is envious of the infant’s “silver cup / with milk in it” and rejects his “ugly doll face,” depersonalizing his “rubber arms,” mutating him into a toy, readying him as an object of murder, even as she is aware of the tragedy of her feelings: “kill the baby / I am sorrow / kill the baby” (“Song of the Abandoned One,” p. 34).

Earlier in the poem, there was less remorse, as is reflected in the “ki” assonance and the resonance of other hard consonant sounds:

The tyrant would die, like the deposition of the king recalled in the poem “Macbeth and the Kids in the Cabin at Chester” (p. 35). “He’ll murder the king, right?” asks one of the writer’s older children, seeking reassurance, though eager, for the fatal blow. Does rivality with younger siblings underpin our fascination for regicide? It is the “fate” of parents to feel murderous and not to kill, and neither to die for the sake of their children. Yet death awaits us all. As we get older, the poet wonders in “In the Autumn of my Thirty-Seventh Birthday” (pp. 37-38), “[m]ust I learn to crawl naked into the cold?”, into the “dreary” world where “cherry blossoms” belong to “age[s]” past, in contrast to the youthfulness of “flirting and shrieking” schoolgirls, an age at which one is oblivious of the sites of death, to a “graveyard”? Children grow; nothing can replace the climactic fulfilment they once brought her. She is left with a bodily memory: “It is right here, the hole / no good thing fills” ( “In the Autumn of my Thirty-Seventh Birthday,” p. 38).

Yet while indulging her infant, taking him on a bike to get “extra sweets,” it seems she is not doing other things that might be important to her; her projects perish: “while he hugs me / the pumpkins rot / in the fields” (“In the Autumn of my Thirty-Seventh Birthday,” p. 38).

It seems she is also wasting away; “I want my healing dreams,” she says, and rails at a friend who refuses to prevent her life from falling apart: “what does she want? to die?” Tender moments with her baby make amends in “Exile” (p. 40): “soft / kisses stitch us together”; but she dreads future “years without kisses,” when he will reject her, “turn away / not to waste breath,” leaving her a tenuous hold on existence, to

In “Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas” (pp. 43-49), motherhood — taking on “the burden the responsibility” of being a mother — is necessary in order to experience perfection as a woman, something women might “have been waiting for,” because the “connection” with a baby — “being touched by this most perfect thing” — is “better than sex”— which is merely “bitter honey”— and a way to reach what is divine in humanity without the disappointments that come with a partnership of ungodlike adults: “Your baby is / the / Most perfect human thing you can ever touch” (“Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas,” p. 44).

Giving birth makes a woman “less vulnerable” physically, makes her “happy,” and contributes to the “destiny” of the world. It is empowering, subverting discourses that position a woman as “acceptable if she is / weak /… a victim,” even a “witch,” “an angry victim.” The writer cries out against the “acceptable” image of the “deodorized sanitized sterilized antiperspirant / grinning efficient woman,” the absent commas emphasising the description as a label. Patriarchial society cannot “tolerate the power of a woman / close to a child” in “the public spaces”; a woman happy, strong, empowered, with a hand in her/our destiny.

In “2: Postscript to Propaganda” (p. 47), we experience the attrition of children on the physical and emotional existence of their mother: “They limit your liberty… your cash… Your sleep is a dirty torn cloth. / They whine until you want to murder them.” They are disgusting, self-destructive, vulnerable in their sickness, “your life peeling away / from you like layers of cellophane.” The mother resents their instrumentalization of her: “you are wheels to them… you are grease”; she struggles to remain whole, independent of them, in control, citing their “disobedience,” whereas earlier in the poem, in “1. The Visiting Poet” (pp. 43-46), she glorifies having a child as “the joy that hurts nobody / the dazzling circuit of contact without dominance.” Women: “cut down” by patriarchy, and by the children themselves. Like warriors, women who bear children end up “wrinkled as tortoises;” but the paradox is that this sacrifice is necessary to empowerment, and noble, hence the war cry with echoes of the Genesis imperative, “Go forth and multiply” —