Sunday, November 15, 2009

Feeling melancholy, and lonely, and useless, as one does, often enough, I opened at random a book I never look into and found this.

from This Woman's Movement (1975)

Nancy Milford

Believe me when I tell you that there have been so few women who wrote and who continued to write and did not fall silent. . . .
         Still, lists don't mean much. It is only that there have been so few women who wrote well. And why is it that among them there are certain limits of range--or at least recognizable types whose critical reputations seem to me to exceed either their abilities or their voices? . . .
          Where is that woman in the prime of her life, telling us what she sees and feels and dreams of? She who has has found her own voice and permits us to witness not only the finding as an act in itself--within the poems--but gives up to us what she has found?

3 comments:

Ruth said...

Dawn, You write so that I experience what you share. You open up new worlds of reading and for that I thank you. Plus your voice asa writer is an inspiration.

Dawn Potter said...

It's a honor to have given you at least a taste of what books have given to me. How empty my life would be without them.

Ruth said...

I can't imagine life without books to read and to think about.