Bøger af Sarah Getty

Spend All You Have is a coming-of-age story set in a suburb of Chicago in 1956. Caroline Prosser, age 11, is teased at school for having a mother who's been to the "funny farm" and a friend whose immigrant parents are rumored to be Communists. Caroline looks forward to being in her sister Joey's December wedding to a progressive young newspaper reporter working on Chicago's South Side. Joey is making her own wedding dress and their father, a Dad out of Norman Rockwell, is fixing up an apartment for the newlyweds above the garage. But the family argues about the groom's politics and Civil Rights, and Caroline's mother, Belle, creates conflicts as she pursues unrealistic escapes from her traditional homemaker's role. Caroline comes home from school to find her mother squeezing into Joey's wedding dress. Convinced that she's about to marry her daughters fiancé. Belle alarms the neighbors by walking to the church through a snowstorm with the torn dress only partially fastened. That night, sedated, she disappears from the house, and even her husband must admit that something is wrong. With her mother in a mental hospital, Caroline confronts intolerance in her school and town. She helps her family weather the crisis, drawing on the support of their African-American house cleaner. In doing all this, she finds new strengths in herself and new compassion for those she loves.

This, Sarah Getty's third and final volume of poetry, takes us into her maturity and the beginnings of old age-which, like Moses, she was sadly destined to see only at a distance. It begins in darkness and the awareness of mortality (in her version of the ancient myth, Nut, the "aged dame," is "painted on the underside of coffin lids") but moves on to the beginning of new life in her celebration of her first grandchild. Then she explores the power of the female to give and sustain life, as well as to ward off death. Finally, the poet returns to one of the chief pleasures of her own too-short life-through her patient, careful, empathic observation ("the camera clicks") giving hosannas (the brush inks a bird) to the cycles of a fecund nature that only very rarely returns the gaze. If the job of humans-we "midges" on earth-is to suffer mortality and death, no one is better than Sarah Getty at giving witness to that transience and suffering. If the task is to give praise, no one does it better than Sarah Getty, with her thanks for all that nature has to offer. And she does so in language that juxtaposes colloquialisms with formal speech, the ancient with the modern, the mythic with the realistic-the mixture conveying her sympathetic and sometime humorous acknowledgment of the human dilemma and its place in the long sweep of the planet's history.

The heroine, Aylin, runs away from the male-less society in which she has been raised to find her twin brother, Nohl, from whom she has been separated since childhood. In her people's mythology, their planet of origin was spoiled by the violence and greed of men, after which God angrily destroyed it, sparing only a small band of women who left the planet carrying the secret of cloning. But the art has been lost, and the women must produce daughters by arranging matings with men from the planet on which they have settled. Aylin stows away with a woman pilot and arrives in the misogynistic men's lands. She spends a year in male disguise at a school where she hopes to find her brother. But her lover betrays her female identity to the officials of the school, and she is arrested. Fighting free of the police, she shelters with an underground women's resistance cult in the city. Aylin is at last reunited with the pilot, who has located Aylin's brother. They achieve psychic contact with the leader of the spared women. Aylin thwarts the school's attempt to gain the secret of cloning and perhaps do away with women. Aylin and Nohl lead their friends to an unsettled land where they start a new nation, hoping that men and women can live harmoniously together.

Meditating on her own experience of girlhood, marriage, and the mothering of a daughter, Getty combines a feminist sensibility with a sense of connection to the realms from which the forces of generation emerge. The poems, range outward and backward through the history of her family's women.