Description
Various aspects of experience in the writer's life as a woman are explored in the fifty poems which comprise the collection called Occupation: Female. The title of the collection is derived from an ironic telescoping of two typical questions found on the traditional printed form, with the implication that femininity in itself can be the truly continuous occupation, so-called "careers" being superimposed upon the center of life-direction perceived by the woman herself. The work is divided into five general sections titled, "Physical and Metaphysical," "Holidays," "Mother and Daughter," "Women Friends," and "Commentary," under which categories are included poems in a variety of forms including among others quatrains, free verse, syllabic, sonnets, prose poems and many pieces in a loosely rhymed form which follows no strict pattern but shows the writer's interest in certain restrictions of boundary. Themes deal with perceptions of love in both the man-woman and mother-daughter relationships, nature, semi-philosophical questions and social commentary, both satirical and more quietly thoughtful. Whether or not Occupation: Female makes a mosaic design of femininity as such, the poems might best be read as a silhouette of one human being's reactions, a personal (and fallible) perception of being, as seen through the play of poetry.
