The Woman in Red

Cynthia Hogue

In this collection of narrative poetry, Cynthia Hogue layers dream-like images over one another to convey a sense of what it means to be a woman—though as Pamela Stewart mentions in her preface, “there are no cozy earth-mothers, simplistic in their decorative aprons.... This is not ‘women’s poetry’ in any publisher’s-blurb sense.” Hogue’s women question identity and sex and being, as does the speaker of “The Seal Woman,” who sees her sisters transformed into humans by the calls of the men ashore. “They come down to the water to keen/ for their lost skin/...But I've caught/ their gaze and—dry so long—/ their eyes fill with the sea.”

A sample poem from the book

The Suicide Sonnet

To be sad today and not to be able to

said at all. This disjuncture

of voice and memory, the something pure

like love past heat past letting know.

What was not done undoes when lovers face

each other’s loss. But yelled at me

you never, no nothing you said you see

I am. I’d have liked to erase

the figure of the woman, with you to say

like Nietzsche that she was truth was

lies and circumstance and always as

I was not. I couldn’t one way

or another imagine you. What was your

harbor. Haven. Where you flowered for.

—for Knud-Erik Holme Pedersen, 1953–1982