The woman I kept to myself

The woman I kept to myself : poems / by Julia Alvarez. -- Chapel Hill : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004.
159 p. ; 21 cm.
ISBN: 1565124065

1. American poetry -- 21st century. 2. Women -- Poetry.

811.54


Emily in one hand, Walt in the other,
that’s how I learned my craft, struggling
to navigate my own way between them
and to get to where I wanted to end up:
some place dead center in the human heart.

From “Passing On” page 139

The result of Alvarez’s craft is far more direct than the idiosyncratic Emily Dickinson and more restrained than the verbose Walt Whitman. And in this volume it keeps to a strict form. The seventy-five poems are uniformly three stanzas, each stanza ten lines, and the median line ten syllables long. The subjects are reflective autobiography. They are very accessible, yet she arrives where she wants to be, in that dead center in the human heart.