'Fidelity: Poems' by Grace Paley

Fidelity

Poems

Grace Paley

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 84 pp., $20

"Poetry may be done with me," Grace Paley told the Los Angeles Times in an interview two months before her death last August, "but I'm not done with it." Strange to think that even as she made the soup, greeted her friends, showed photographs of her grandchildren, talked about her writing, the poet was dying.

I have experienced the amputation

of my left breast I hate its absence.

"Fidelity," posthumously (odd word, recalling dirt) published, is her fourth collection of poems. Clearly, she had death and its retinue -- illness, aging, memory, regret -- in mind. Clearly, she was angry at the prospect of death, unready to surrender.

In any event I am

already old and therefore a little ashamed

to have written this poem full

of complaints against mortality which

biological fact I have been constructed for

to hand on to my children and grand

children as I received it from my

dear mother and father and beloved

grandmother who all

ah if I remember it

were in great pain at leaving

and were furiously saying goodbye