Four Testimonies

"The Testimony of Simone Weil, " the first of the four long poems that form Kate Daniels' new collection, gives voice to the radical French political thinker and religious philosopher. Here Weil meditates on some of the most famous images by Eugene Atget, the acclaimed documentary photographer who recorded a perishing Old Paris. Three survivors of the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake tell of the calamity and its aftermath in the narrative poem "In the Marvelous Dimension." Echoing the Greek myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, "The Smash-Up" centers on a divorced woman and the sufferings of her grown daughter, whose husband has just committed suicide. In this poem, Daniels ruminates on marriage, sexuality, inherited behavior, and spousal abuse and portrays a mother's guilt at failing her offspring. "Portrait of the Artist as Mother, " twenty poems that compose the final sequence of the collection, finds new life and second chances, exploring the difficulties of motherhood as well as its bounties. Daniels artfully contemplates the obstacles involved in maintaining one's identity as a writer and as a woman while confronting the challenges of motherhood.