Poetics of Desire

In this study of Dorothy Livesay’s love poetry, Nadine McInnis focuses on Livesay’s maturing sense of herself as an artist, exploring the sexual/ ­textual conflicts present in much of Livesay’s love poetry and their later ­resolution."Tracing Livesay's treatment of love through sixty years of poetry is not merely an illumination of one woman's extraordinary 'psychic autobiography.'...Tracing such a vein illuminates with a kind of phosphorescent clarity how a woman's blood-line, a woman's deepest and most unconscious sense of reality, flows from her own private experiences out into the larger world governed by forces not natural, but man-made."-- From Poetics of Desire