It is important that Bogan wrote often of the body--bodily appetites, bodily knowledge, bodily resistance to inchoate or complexly organized coercion. Yet in her late poems the body is diffused, made benignly strange, at times a source of symbol in retrospect.

[. . . .]

In "The Dragonfly," for instance, the insect's body is "made of almost nothing / But of enough / To be great eyes / And diaphanous double vans." The body that she chooses to describe is translucent and finally a "husk," emptied out by having fully spent itself in its environment and through the short span of its allotted lifetime.

|

From Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan. Copyright © 1996 by Associated University Presses