Alice Burns
She champions a ‘ faithfulness ’ to the female self , the female voice re-incarnated as a resilient ‘ weed .’ She urges the female narrative to break through the obstinate ‘ tar ’ and ‘ bedrock disbelief ’ of patriarchy which threatens to prevent the female voice ‘ piercing ’ through this landscape of destruction : instead they rise through the ashes . a silence that had to be overcome .’ Arshi also uses poetry as a means to break this silence . Dear Big Gods offers a much more intimate experience of destruction for the individual through Arshi ’ s conversations with grief and the unsettling violence of the contemporary world , compared to Rich ’ s firm roots in Second Wave feminism .
On balance , destruction is a vital mechanism through which Adrienne Rich and Mona Arshi articulate the female poetic voice , offering various reconstructions of re-imagined female narratives . Destruction is used as a means by which Arshi reinvents the mythical self in Dear Big Gods , whereas Rich ’ s Diving into the Wreck offers a more nuanced approach to myth in redefining the self in the light of her engagement with the destructive social and political inequalities challenged by Second Wave Feminism . Alicia Ostrika examines the possibilities of revisionist mythmaking , explaining that , ‘ Like the gods and goddesses of classical mythology , all such material has a double power .’ This ‘ double power ’ relies on the ability to both destroy and recreate as vital processes of development , breaking through the silence so often restricting female narratives . Rich argues : ‘ Every poem breaks
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Works Cited : Annas , P . ‘ A Poetry of Survival : Unnaming and Renaming in the Poetry of Audre Lorde , Pat Parker , Sylvia Plath , and Adrienne Rich ’, Colby Quarterly 18.1 ( 1982 )
Arshi , M . ‘ Ballad of The Small-Boned Daughter ’, Feminist Review , 112.1 ( 2016 ) < https :// doi . org / 10.1057 / fr . 2015.57 >.
Arshi , M . Dear Big Gods ( Liverpool : Liverpool University Press , 2018 )
Dowson , J . and Entwhistle , A . A History of Twentieth-Century British Women ’ s Poetry ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2006 )
Erkan , A . U . ‘ An Ecofeminist Approach to Adrienne Rich ’ s Poem Diving into the Wreck ’, Gazi University Journal of Gazi Educational Faculty , 32.2 ( 2012 )
Gelpi , B . C , Gelpi , A . and Millier , B . eds . Adrienne Rich : Poetry and Prose , ‘ What is Found There ’ ( 2003 ) 2nd edition ( New York : W . W Norton and Co , 2018 )
Gilbert , S . and Gubar , S . The Madwoman in the Attic ( New York : Yale University Press , 2000 )
Lara , I . ‘ Beyond Caliban ’ s