Portraits of Women

Julie Fay

In this collection, Julie Fay uses narrative poetry to paint meaningful scenes lifted from history and personal experience to create a work that examines the lives of American women. The first section, entitled “Burlington Homestead,” describes an American family’s struggle to make a place for themselves in nineteenth-century southern Iowa, faced with the challenges of both the physical world and the inner world of personal desire. Part Two, “Sarah’s Story,” is about a young woman’s need to leave her marriage in order to discover herself and her art. Both sections analyze a woman’s role in time and place. Marilyn Hacker states in the introduction that this collection is “...all the more remarkable considering the range of places [the] book traverses: grasshoppers overwhelming a field of squash blossoms, wild azaleas blooming along a mountain streambed, the lunar landscape of a limestone col. Strongest of all, perhaps, is her more intimate range: the evocation of those gestures that define and preserve our humanity...”

A sample poem from the book

For At Least Seeds

Eliza, at times God shows mercy:

You’re not here to see the southwest field

Naked as it is. We never talked

About love, but I was always thinking

To tell you sometime when we walked

Before sunset. You’d cry to stand here now,

The fields look all burned.

Today we commenced to shovel the

Bugs away. The children are strong. Leck

Went to town for at least seeds

For your vegetable garden and came back

With reports: The trains stalled.

Hoppers a foot thick

Coming over riverbanks like a flood.

Eliza, when you died I didn’t cry,

But these times could make a sane man

Crazy. Sometimes I imagine you here,

Walking with me and marking off

Each damaged acre.