Book Notes

Mothers of Poetic Invention

NOT FOR MOTHERS ONLY

Contemporary Poems

on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing

Edited by Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff

Fence Books. 544 pp. Paperback, $24.99

Just in time for Mothers' Day comes this anthology of poems about the experience of motherhood, or "the thousand experiences, the thousand interruptions," as poet Alicia Ostriker writes in the foreword. Edited by two friends who met in the early 1990s at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Not for Mothers Only collects poems on a range of subjects under the motherhood umbrella, some intimate and personal, others historical and political.

Among the contributors are well-known poets (Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forché, Sharon Olds, for example) and emerging ones (most are likely to be new to readers). There's very little in the way of helpful structuring: The contributors are not arranged thematically, but according to the arrival of their first child.

Catherine Wagner, in the introduction, calls this book a "comforting corrective to those who feel isolated as mother-artists," and Rebecca Wolff notes that "poets who are mothers" often get asked, "How has being a mother changed your writing?" Her own response is "brutally literal . . . pragmatic as a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich on allergen-free bread": "My poems are a lot shorter now."

Not for Mothers Only is an odd title for a poetry anthology that seems to be precisely for mothers; it's wishful thinking on the part of the editors that anyone else is going to be much interested in an anthology dealing with the "life-changing joys and rigors of motherhood." Still, lovely language abounds in these pages and provocative phrases, and, as Eddy Arnold used to sing, "Put them all together, they spell Mother, a word that means the world to me."