Review by Dr. Mary DeShazer, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC.
Author of Inspiring Women: Reimagining the Muse (1987), The Poetics of Resistance: Women Writing From El Salvador, South Africa and the United States (1994) and Editor of the forthcoming: The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature (2000)

The compelling poems that comprise Healing the Womanheart reflect on love, desperation, and redemption in spare, eloquent language. Her generous heart fully intact, Monza Naff celebrates the power of spiritual healing without diminishing the depth of her suffering or the world’s. This luminous collection will appeal to lovers and scholars of poetry as well as to readers who are linking poetry and women’s spirituality for the first time.

The book’s opening section, “Claiming the Legacy,” explores the painful and joyful dimensions of family inheritance. Naff commemorates two very different grandmothers, for example: one who made magic for her granddaughter — “Grandma of the tapioca / pulled the taffy into string”; another who grew “roses from her rage”: “she tilled her shrill, sharp tongue, / her gossip, judgments, and despair into the earth / and the ground gave thorns.” In one of the volume’s most moving narratives, “The Old Ones,” Naff evokes an elderly aunt’s harrowing recollection of being raped in an orchard by her cousin more than seventy years ago, a memory that returns to her while canning with her niece. The poet also chronicles the trials of being the daughter of ministers, the pleasure of purchasing her first work of art, the rich smells of a kitchen in which a turkey is roasting, the safety of home.

Section Two, “Exposing the Illusions,” foregrounds individual and cultural experience that many women prefer to leave unexamined. Naff believes that only when we ground ourselves in the blessing of nature and confront our abuse — and abusers — with rage and clarity can we begin to heal. Thus in “Petroglyph Lake” she listens in awe as “drums whisper in the lakebed,” watches “ancient nightfires crackle,” and hears “the keening, wailing” of both her ancestors and herself. She pauses in disbelief as “Monday’s First Appointment,” a therapist’s client who has beaten his lover, remains unrepentant, choosing instead to “disengage his person from her pain.” She listens in outrage as a group of sanctimonious church fathers revoke the license of a lesbian minister because of her sexual orientation, and she exults as the woman shapes her spirited reply: “I do not give you permission / to silence my voice.”

The final section, “Healing the Womanheart,” moves from resistance to transformation. Whether witnessing the miracle of a crocus blooming in snow or the “grace of golden weeping,” Naff pays homage to the process of becoming whole. In “Self-Portrait II” she describes her own journey toward truth: “No more timidity, no cringing. / I can say no with grace.” In “Tilting” the agent of change is a writer’s studio on the Oregon coast, the ocean “molten lead beneath the moon.” In “Womanrites” the speaker finds joy in the rituals of daily life with her lover, “sharing dreams, / extending solitary night wanderings, / alone no more.” And in a lovely seasonal sequence, the poet prays for the release of autumn, the thaw of winter’s end, the fertile ache of spring, and the fullness of summer.

The lyrical magic and emotional resonance of Monza Naff’s poems in Healing the Womanheart have caused me to return to them again and again. Her precision of language and image in evoking the natural world has helped me to retrieve a sense of the sacred in my life. Her homages to the women she has held dear — her grandmothers, her lovers past and present, the members of her support group — transcend the private and rank among the best feminist lyrical tributes I have read. Her ritual pieces are equally moving when read aloud to one’s self at home and when performed publicly and multivocally, as they have been before audiences in California and the Pacific Northwest. These are poems of compassion, solidarity, and survival; these are poems that women long to read.

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