No Heaven

I just finished Alicia Suskin Ostriker's No Heaven, a brave and beautiful text for our times. Ostriker's perspective is vast, nuanced, crafted, and compelling. Her poems speak to the spiritual longing many of us have in times of desperation and war, as well as to the hunger for better words, better ways of making meaning. Some of her poems are ekphrastic, many elegiac, and all certainly memorable.

The penultimate poem, "Daffodils," starts "The day the war against Iraq begins / I'm photographing the yellow daffodils" and closes "Don't you think / It is our business to defend it / Even the day our masters start a war? / To defend the day we see the daffodils?"

Don't be fooled, though. Ostriker is not the photographer with her back to the war. She is a lover of life in spite of war -- in response to war.