Book Review: Our Emily Dickinsons is a more academic approach than I (a non-academic) was expecting, and is not a Michael Lewis-like effort to make the esoteric approachable. I'm not sure why I thought this would be a pop-lit endeavor, since it is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and Professor Pollak teaches English at the esteemed Washington University in St. Louis. But the erudite nature of the book is not a bad thing. For those studying in the field, Pollak raises intriguing and creative approaches to the issues addressed, which are an invaluable resource and an excellent jumping-off point (she herself jumping off from Muriel Rukeyser's writings) for further investigations in American women's poetry. The author states that in "intellectually challenging, emotionally arduous poems that invite and repel intimacy, Dickinson links ... ugly feelings (such as shame and envy) to what I call trace scenes, scenes that evoke collective experience but mystify important personal particulars," and that she views "Dickinson's achievement as an extended meditation on the risks of social, psychological, and aesthetic difference." That seems like a mouthful to me, but if that speaks clearly to you, this is your book. The Notes, Bibliography, and Indexes are truly impressive; if you want someone to do your research, go no further. The book's subtitle is "American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference," and Pollak first examines some of Dickinson's biography and then relates her work to that of Helen Hunt Jackson, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop (Ted Hughes and Adrienne Rich also make idiosyncratic appearances), and how those poets related to Dickinson. Let me admit I'm not fully qualified to evaluate this book, but I can tell you why I believe it's valuable. Dickinson and Plath are two of America's four or five greatest poets (although Plath's best output is tiny, like the statistics of a spectacular athlete whose career was cut short), and Moore and Bishop are today too much forgotten and due for revival. Pollak has looked into some dark corners of women's poetry that needed to be explored: In "some of the intimate reading practices through which women poets interrogate Dickinson, her literary culture, their literary cultures, and themselves." Pollak concludes that Dickinson's "multifaceted achievement exceeds any critic's ability to define it" even as she argues that women poets who write about Dickinson "are writing about themselves as well. They use Dickinson to test the validity of their own emotional and intellectual needs" as her "paradoxical self-awareness encourages us to draw close and to keep our distance." I enjoyed it for what I could take away at my level, as there's much to appreciate even without climbing the ivory tower, though it's certainly there for those who want to go up the steps. Personally I've always enjoyed going deeper and deeper into Dickinson's small poems, like going into the nucleus of an atom -- her small poems are enormous (a wonderful contrast with Whitman). Our Emily Dickinsons is an excellent examination of some of America's finest poets, and should find its way into myriad footnotes in scholarly papers and journals. [4★]
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