As an admirer of Robert Crawford's poetry, I was happy to see the positive review of his book. The section on his love poems was particularly good. But I thought the criticism of his satirical poem about Millay was rather unfair. The following line from the review uses what I believe is a politically loaded word in an inappropriate way:
"The sad thing about 'Millay’s Child' is that it threatens to taint the entire volume with its determined misogyny."
The reviewer is much fairer and more moderate in his judgment when he uses the facts of Millay's biograpyy to demonstrate that the poet's abortion was probably motivated more by being disregarded by the unborn child's father than by personal vanity or fear of having her art eclipsed by parental responsibilities. There was no need to blast the satire for "determined misogyny"--an unproven charge anyway--and then suggest that the entire volume must then be interrogated to ensure that it hasn't been tainted. The reviewer adds:
"After reading it, one returns to the love poems to ascertain whether Too Much Explanation Can Ruin a Man contains any poems that portray women in a positive light and as something other than objects of desire."
Though the reviewer concludes, "Fortunately, as we shall see in turning to the narrative poems, it does," the conclusion only serves to show that raising the charge in the first place was unnecessary.
Similarly, while the reviewer chastises the poet for having a political motivation for giving the fetus a gender and using a personal pronoun, him or her, to describe it in the poem, he is just as doctrinaire as the poet in his own use of the word "fetus" to describe the unborn child. Should we likewise say to Anne Sexton that the refrain line of her abortion villanelle shoud not have been "Someone who should have been born is gone," but rather "Some fetus who should have come to term is gone" ? After all some"one" might betray a suspect political agenda.
I don't think that in writing a poem, the word "child" or "him" or "her"
is less appropriate than a clinical term like "fetus." (What sobbing woman after a miscarriage cries out, "I've lost my fetus!") As in raising the charge of "misogyny," the reviewer here seems a little too bent on being politically correct. As if one has to be a little extra careful when favorably reviewing the book of a religious conservative not to absorb some of the taint.
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