Aline Soules

In her opening poem, “After Translating the Women of the 20th century,” Hoffman lays out her intentions. She calls the poem “a prayer” and the prayer is offered in the opening two lines: “This winter I want a house / where women glide from god’s photographs. These lines repeat, particularly the “want.” By the end of the poem, wanting a house shifts from a want to a mantra. Of note, also, is the title. Hoffman is not only a poet, she is a translator. She further specifies “the women of the 20th century, a large canvas from which her poems can emerge.

Also in this poem, she references two of the three sections in her collection: “This winter I want a house / with a garden and one rose.”

Primed for what comes, we enter “The Garden” and encounter “A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ.” Before we learn the details of the garden, we are presented with the opening:

You must imagine Eurydice

happy, that hell, too,

is an industrious world

Eurydice was an Auloniad, a nymph who lived in mountain valleys and pastures. This modern garden is no pasture, the dining table “alive” with breadcrumbs and a rabbit, the area “...caught / between the rainbowed bridge traffic of delivery trucks,” and the adjacency to a cemetery (a place for modern-day Eurydice).

...This is where,

finally, so much life

on your hands,

you will sleep:

Eurydice appears many times in this collection, rooting the 20th century women in Greek mythology and carrying commonality across the centuries. In “The Townspeople contemplate Eurydice,” a woman is “alone again” (perhaps as Eurydice might have been alone in hell). She’s “brushing / her teeth…in her boring / underwear.” Yet, Hoffman explodes this to a larger world with following to the “boring underwear” with the unexpected:

an orchid

opening underground

like that Russian poet

who wished

to be buried

alive beneath an oak tree.

Then “the woman’s moon / descends the smokestacks” and “swims / the sea again.” Eventually, “her mind goes on / uncontrollably,”

Her toothbrush the scythe—

her mind is the blood of the tree.

This explosion is one of Hoffman’s gifts, giving the reader, an all-encompassing, larger world.

In the second section, “The Replica,” Hoffman offers more poems in first person point of view. “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College” explores women’s experiences of sexuality and constraint. In this poem, she weaves in mythological and literary figures making the boys mythological, too.

There’s also the complexity of the “I’s” relationship with her sister, a rivalry. These modern-day gods and goddesses don’t necessarily behave any better than some of the figures she chooses.

In “Myth of Icarus as Girl, Leaving,” the “I” has a complex relationship with her brother who is “wailing / and wielding the dinner knives, infecting the music / with angry notes.” She visits Israel and discovers this is “nothing like the prophets we learn about in Sunday school.” She plants a tree “with the certainty [her] brother will reemerge from beneath the sea.” But his call “puncture[s]” her solitude,

…the air spinning all around his body,

the holiday meal ruined, the rabbit in the orchard, the fish watching

from the other side of their mirrored life; it seems

the fish keep swimming across the other side of our flooding world.

The third section, “Then Roses,” offers even more poems in first-person point of view, bringing the “I” even closer to the reader. In “Mary Magdalene, Mary Oliver, & Me,” she holds a baby in her lap, but she also “throws the apron in the trash.” But this liberation has consequences: a car breaking down, a paycheck emptied, and a new job at Appleby’s which causes her class attendance at community college to suffer. Then “Gary (the regular)” brings her the poems of Mary Oliver, and her world shifts with the discovery of Oliver’s words:

After when I sit like this, quiet, all the dreams of my blood. After how it wasn’t

about the bird it was something about the way the stone stays mute and put.

This is redemption through the discovery of art.

Eurydice is one metaphor. The apple is another. In the previously-mentioned “A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ,” the apple and the orchard are lost innocence. In this section, “Eden in Foreclosure brings back the apple: “Farm Fresh Apples swings the wooden sign above / a crowded barrel where Eurydice stands…” bringing together the apple and Eurydice. Later in the poem,

She [Eurydice] thinks to touch the apple, but can’t, not

like the way it once was, description

falling from her mouth like bad teeth.

Again, innocence is gone. More than that, there is pain in its loss:

It hurts to remember the apple

born blondly from the earth into speech.

There is no going back.

The relationships in Hoffman’s poems are deeply complex, and it is impossible to enter one of her poems and not wrestle with that complexity. Each poem is a broad sweep, engulfing landscape and people, where the mythological become real, and the real becomes mythological.

Hoffman’s work is worth many readings. Each time, the reader will find something new to contemplate.