A Poet's Sacrifice into Prose

     Review of: The Great Cosmic Mother, rediscovering the religion of the earth, by Monica Sjoo and Barbar Mor, Harper & Row, 1987, $16.95

     I have been waiting for poets to review, praise, argue over this book by Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo.  I've been wondering where are the fierce feminist poets, political poets, the New Age poets?  Maybe I've not looked hard enough for discussion of this land‑mark study of the history of the consequences of the attempt to destroy the matriarchal, the earth‑centered,  communal consciousness.  Barbara Mor is a poet, one of the very best we have.  She gave years of her life to prose, and it is up to us now to demonstrate her uncompromising dedication has not been wasted.  We should be grateful that Harper and Row has published the book, and not surprised that they have not promoted it as well as they have their other "goddess" books.  The Great Cosmic Mother is a political book like few others.  It is radical, goes to the root of political oppression.  Since Mor is a poet, she goes also to the root of the oppression we tolerate in our literature.  Here is one sample, of hundreds, of how The Great Cosmic Mother makes the past contemporary, forces us to re‑examine all that we would otherwise see as natural.  She points to the Gilgamesh Epic, nearly 4,000 years old, the founding model for Western literature, and shows it for what it was and the consequences for us all:  "This new individuality, mocking, arrogantly alienated ego of Gilgamesh, established in defiance of the Old Religion of the Goddess and the earth, becomes in Western religious and secular history the ego of man" (p. 246).  If the political writers, the feminists, New Age goddess worshipers refuse to face up to the power of the language of this book, the poets must not be silent. I know of no other book of the last couple years that places on us such great demands that we as poets and writers must read  it so passionately and passionately respond.

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