INTRODUCING DALE KUSHNER

by GLADYS SWAN

My first introduction to the work of Dale Kushner came more than fifteen years ago at Vermont College, where she was working on an MFA degree in Creative Writing. Over the years, I have read her poetry with a growing admiration for its ambition, insight, and language. It has been published in a wide range of literary magazines. Her collection, The History of Desire, addresses a central issue of our existence: desire as a battleground, from which both torment and possible salvation can emerge. She enters with grace and courage into certain neglected regions of our culture, dealing not only with desire as it yields the sensuous and erotic, but with spiritual longing and ecstatic love. She uses the figure of Mary Magdalene, in particular, to explore these issues with depth and subtlety and to celebrate the various potentialities of the feminine.

And this, too, the feminine in its fullness, is what Dale explores with such fine sensitivity and symbolic resonance in the novel she has lately undertaken. Drawing from myth and fairy tale as well as the real conflicts in relationships, she presents a vision of what happens when the feminine is denied its due. Thus the tormented narrator of her novel, Lower Than Angels, explores a past that opens to her a sense of potentiality that is ultimately betrayed. But from this betray the protagonist emerges with a deeper sense of self and finds her way to a liberation beyond the personal past or the trammels of conventional roles. The language of the novel, like that of her poetry, is sensuous and evocative.

I believe that Dale Kushner’s work will become an important contribution to our culture as it reminds us once again to consider what is required to achieve our fullest potential, physically and spiritually. With the approach of the millennium, what we require, I believe, is a literature committed to reaffirming our universal connections, with an increased attention to those realities best evoked by the mythic and symbolic. Perhaps we can look forward to the enlargement of consciousness these avenues make possible and recover what has been neglected by a too narrow rationalism.

Originally published in The Literary Review, Vol 43, No. 1