Poet, essayist, and playwright Susan Griffin was born in 1943 in Los Angeles, California. An early awareness of the horrors of World War II and her childhood in the High Sierras have had an enduring influence on her work, which includes poetry, prose, and mixed genre collections. A playwright and radical feminist philosopher, Griffin has also published two books in a proposed trilogy of “social autobiography.” Her work considers ecology, politics, and feminism, and is known for its innovative, hybrid form. Her collections in this vein include
Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978);
A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (1982), which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award, won a BABRA Award, and was a
New York Times Notable Book;
The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender, and Society (1995);
What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows (1999);
The Book of Courtesans: A Catalog of their Virtues (2001); and
Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen (2008). Her play,
Voices (1975), won an Emmy and has been performed throughout the world. She also co-edited, with Karen Loftus Carrington, the anthology
Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of Terror (2011). In addition to her numerous books on society and ideas, Griffin has written several volumes of poetry, including
Dear Sky (1971);
Like the Iris of an Eye (1976);
Unremembered Country (1987), which won the Commonwealth Club’s Silver Medal for Poetry; and
Bending Home: Selected and New Poems 1967-1998 (1988).
Griffin’s poetry is known for its minimalist style and interest in politics and the domestic.
Unremembered Country has been described as a poetic mosaic of female self-discovery. “All of the poems are written in a tightly controlled, minimal style,” commented Bill Tremblay in
American Book Review, “that witnesses to the most serious crises in our lives, even to the ‘unspeakable’ cruelties, while at the same time not becoming ‘another facet of the original assault.’“ Griffin’s prose collections also consider ideas of crises and feminism, and are frequently as combative as they are elegant. The magazine
Ms. described Griffin’s
Woman and Nature as “cultural anthropology, visionary prediction, literary indictment, and personal claim. Griffin’s testimony about the lives of women throughout Western civilization reveals extensive research from Plato to Galileo to Freud to Emily Carr to Jane Goodall to
Adrienne Rich… Griffin moves us from pain to anger to communion with and celebration of the survival of woman and nature,” the reviewer concluded.
How my heart sings 