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Review of Motherhood  Open in new Window.
Review by Codex33486 Author IconMail Icon
Rated: ASR | (4.0)
Hello, Harry; Codex33486 here with a review. This 26-line piece draws a parallel between the treatment of a lioness toward her own cub and a lioness toward her adolescent male offspring on the one hand and a drug-dazed human mother who abandons her own child in favor of her own challenges. To read it, it sounds like one of Laurie Anderson's spoken-word pieces--it's about the right length, and it ends with quite a punch. I heard once that when a puppy reaches a certain age, the mother simply doesn't recognize it any more, and this phenomenon saves the mother a good deal of pain. This piece includes that trope in its description of the lioness who bats away her own injured but adolescent and thus past the critical age cub. The piece gets its power from the assurance that we can have that the baby which is abandoned is clearly under any critical age that might apply to the lioness, and thus the human mother's failure to protect it, to meets its needs, and so forth, is seen not only by us, but would be seen by Nature, as a grievous violation of the obligation a mother has to her offspring--feline or human. At some point there is a cultural shift in which a mother such as the one described no longer must act to protect and nurture her child--graduation of the child from college, perhaps, or the marriage of the child--and while the human mother never forgets the child in the way that the lioness (or the canine mother does), it is easily defensible for the mother not to come to the aid of such a child. This piece gets its power from the fact that there's no way we can apply such logic here to excuse the human mother's behavior. The mother is painted not only as self-serving, but as willing to explore avenues, no matter how tenuous, to excuse her behavior; this makes her even more contemptible. I note that the form does not conform to my expectations for poetry: capitalization of first words in a line, for instance. There's no particular meter or rhyme, but that is less of an expectation for me than the failure to capitalize first words. However, what is lost in form here--if anything--is more than made up for in content. To my ear, there's a bit of a logical error in Line 20 in the description of the two men's facial expressions in the singular; I would expect the plural there. But that's a quibble--the usage seems to me to be well within the latitude afforded to a poet. The last line, especially, puts words which are obvious to us in the mouth of the lioness. For me, this has the effect of confirming my own strongly-held belief that mothers should have the decency to protect their babies by having this be the attitude of the lioness, whose viewpoint must be considered natural in the poetic sense. Overall, a good piece with a strong message that motivated me to discuss it a little bit.
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