To Put the Mouth to: Poems

How does a woman's awakening to articulation end in self-censorship? Hall ( The Old Vows ) explores this question in this series of interrelated poems, selected by Richard Howard for the 1991 National Poetry Series. Hall begins with the figure of Eve who, lacking language, cannot differentiate reality, perceiving only ``perfumed blasts / Of simple shapes.'' With Eve's growing awareness of words, however, comes the realization that, despite her primacy, her language is already male-dominated; ``Possessives fix and hiss the world into / His echo.'' With this initiation into a secondary status in language, Eve experiences erotic initiation, the nature of which is also oral and leads Eve to conflate speaking with adoring her lover--putting her ``mouth to.'' Thus, Eve speaks not to express herself, but to please, and her descendants follow her example, even the contemporary Woman of Letters who commences her lecture by ``apologizing at the beginning for my ignorance''--winning an audience through self-abnegation. At times Hall writes as if she's an art history professor soliloquizing during a high fever: ``De Kooning and Picasso. / Deformity embraced as part of an affair / Of shapes, cubes--a truth.'' More often than not, however, her dense style fascinates and disarms. (May)