Eve
Although Eve may be seen as a symbol of the demonization of women, she shares many characteristics with the ancient mother-goddesses worldwide from whom her story derives. Like her predecessors, Eve brought both death and life to humanity. In some Judeo-Christian legends, she also persuaded God to allow humans to be resurrected. Annie Finch's poetry reveals an original and unforgettable poetic voice, one with a musical and passionate elegance. The different genres in Eve include a lyric sequence on ancient goddesses, a literary parody, a protest poem, and an original myth. When mother Eve took the first apple down/from the tree that grew where nature's heart had been/and came tumbling, circling, rosy, into sin/which goddesses were lost, and which were found?/What spirals moved in pity and unwound/across our mother's body with the spin/of planets lost for us and all her kin?/What serpents curved their mouths into a frown,/but left their bodies twined in us like threads/that lead us back to her? Her presence warms,/and if I follow closely through the maze,/it is to where her remembered reaching spreads/in branching gifts, it is to her reaching arms/that I look, as if for something near to praise.  --Midwest Book ReviewAncestorAnother ReluctanceAphroditeBeing A ConstellationBrigidChangng WomanThe Circled SandCoatliqueCourtshipCoy MistressDaughterThe DoorDriving Past VioletsEncounterEveFrozen InThe GardenGreat Reading Room MuralsGulf War And Child: A CurseIn Cities, Be AlertInannaInsectInside The VioletThe Last MermotherLucid WakingMy RaptorNo SnakeNutPearlThe PitcherRain BirthRhiannonRunning In ChurchSamhainSapphics For PatienceSpider WomanStrangersThanksgivingThree Generations Of SecretsTributeWalk With MeWestminsterThe Wish For EyesZaraf's Star--Table of Poems fromPoem Finder®Annie Finch's brilliance as a young poet lies in her view of the world as complex: her passionate examinations of family relationships, of family history, of the search to understand one's place in the world are underpinned by a syntax and a poetic design equally passionate and complex. This is a formidable first volume of poetry  --Molly PeacockFinch's poems are wild. Her formal structures and vocabulary tie down an explosive vision of feminine power, aligned with fertility and earthiness.... When Finch steps outside herself, she looks back at the female body, her vehicle of connection to the originals of things, to fertility, "root of the live earth, live through my body. Sinking body, walk in me now." She calls herself away from the pity that might be in this darkness, through claims to the legacy of feminine power --Hungry Mind Review, Fall, 1997[Finch] provides us with a superb anthology of interesting and rewarding verse forms: sonnets, traditional and rebellious both; a villanelle; and several more arcane forms chosen for their appropriateness to the subject, such as the four-stress lines of Inanna, a Sumerian form for a Sumerian goddess.... [she] is often associated with the poets known as the new formalists, but she cheerfully and with great competence ignores several of their stated principles, such as avoidance of European cultural totems or adherence to a self-consciously American idiom  --The Washington Times, July 6, 1997