Gendering poetry - Vicki Bertram

Vicki Bertram shows that gender is a crucial, though often overlooked, ingredient in the writing, reading and interpretation of poetry. In accessible language, she begins with a substantial overview and critique of the contemporary debate on poetry and gender. She then moves on discuss the work of selected lyric poets from the 1950s onwards. Where men tend to have an authoritative poetic voice, many women poets show an unease with their poetic personae. An exception is Sylvia Plath who confidently and repeatedly explored alternatives to the masculine sublime of a majestic and threatening nature, often mocking masculine grandiosity in the process. Bertram then moves on to analyse Birthday Letters and suggests they should be read as letters (rather than poems) and that Ted Hughes' own versions of Plath's poems show a fundamental misreading of her poetry, substituting male rivalry for her energy, eroticism and force. Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, two poets from Guyana, now resident in Britain, both tackle the colonial past in their poetry, but where Dabydeen's analysis is cerebral and bleak, Nichols presents a sensual and more optimistic picture.;Bertram asks: how much does this difference depend on their gender? Finally, five younger male poets are examined for signs of change from the recurring themes that preoccupied the previous generation - adolescence, issues of inheritance and the avoidance of emotion.