believes in a direct way. She describes much of her own life in terms of torture and torment, exaggerating the sexual discrimination she has felt and emphasizing her own pain and the fact that even her poetry cannot fully eliminate it. One of the poems where these themes are most evident is "My Life You Are Talking About," and in the first stanza the poet brings together many of these themes--her motherhood, her concern for her sons, her role as poet, her personal pain:
when I mention my children, or these poems,
Pratt is angry whenever someone tries to make her life into something paper thin, as a poem, and yet that is what she herself does over and over again. Poetry for her is an act of anger as well as a necessary self-expression, necessary even if it generates anger in her. This is one of the sources of her pain, the need to express her life on paper and the anger the act itself creates within her. Her poetry has an anger and a sense of frustration within it that is embodied in the language, the imagery, and the themes she addresses.
Pratt, Minnie Bruce. Crime Against Nature. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand, 1990.
Thom Gunn in his book The Man with Night Sweats offers poems that speak directly to the concerns of this era, concerns related to disease, notably AIDS, and to the death and destruction that disease is leaving in its wake. He is also concerned with the mechanization of human life and with the encroachment of the machine into every aspect of our lives. The poet lives in San Francisco, and that city figures in many of these poems and serves especially as the city where AIDS has decimated the gay population. Much of Gunn's imagery is imagery of the city, of scenes in the city or aspects of city life, and of the means of communication and transportation common to the city. The activity of the city is often contrasted or compared with the action of the human body, and the body tends to slow down over
...