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The eight essays in this collection explore the work of Adrienne Rich, one of America s most significant living writers and a poet and a public intellectual with a substantial audience both inside and outside the academy. Taken together, the essays argue for a shift in the perceived center of gravity of Rich s career, from the passionate and eloquent poems of a largely personal feminist awakening, from the mid 60s to the early 80s, to the equally (if differently) passionate and eloquent poems of a more broadly public re-imagination of our country and its history, beginning with her work of the mid 1980s.Rich has remained committed to the reconstruction of poetry s place in public as well as private life, nationally and globally. From varied perspectives, accessible to the common reader as well as the specialist, the collection addresses Rich s negotiation of the boundary between these public and private spheres and the potential of poetry as a revolutionary medium and alternate epistemology, a means, as the title expresses it, of recovery and regeneration. Rich has aimed always, as the last lines of her poemPlanetarium(1968) have it, atthe relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind,and this collection works to describe her effort to extend the reach of that healing motive across a continent and a culture.'In these eight keenly executed essays edited by William Waddell, we see Rich finally removing thoseasbestos glovesonce used to handle sizzling political topics. Critics in this volume show Adrienne Rich struggling barehanded with changing poetic strategies, complex new subject positions and the relations of power and cultural practice in the constitution of history.Transformative cartographer of words and perceptions, Rich, as Waddell argues, outlinesa method for redefining American space,remapping North American culture for the marginalized, the repressed and the resistant.Waddell s collection celebrates the polyphony of politics and aesthetics in Rich s work, shaping for the reader an ethical discourse intensively visible, for the first time, in volumes such as An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, but equally present throughout Rich s prose and poetry.'Mary Lynn Broe, Caroline Werner Gannett Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

Superb criticism.
This important study is highly astute in its analysis--and very accessible.Ratcliffe is a first-rate thinker and writer.

A wonderful book
Three great geniuses are presented here. Where would we be without the unbelievably courageous Mary Daly? And Virginia Woolf is still an important early voice, especially as presented by Jane Marcus and other brilliantradicals. As for Rich, is there a more brilliant writer in"America" today? I think not.

magnificent
This book dares to include three of the very greatest writers of the century. Mary Daly is the incredibly courageous voice of contemporary radical feminism, Woolf is still valuable for her essays, and Adrienne Rich is a truly visionary poet who has changed the way contemporary discourse isconducted. A wonderful book.

Interesting, but....
It's a little hard to see how Mary Daly can even be mentioned with a great genius like Virginia Woolf, especially when one considers that Woolf was able to make a new rhetoric apart from patriarchal language, while "theorists" like Daly have only succeeded in questioning contemporary discourse. Nevertheless, a worthwhile book that, when dealing with a major figure like Virginia Woolf, deserves to be read. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Selected Poems 1950-1995
Adrienne Rich is without question one of the most distinguished contemporary poets. She has had a profound and positive effect on a generation of writers and readers since her poems first appeared in the 1951 collection A Change of World. In the years since then her poetry and prose have been published in over twenty volumes. Adrienne Rich: Selected Poems 1950-1995 contains poems from her first and recent works as well as twelve others, including Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), Diving into the Wreck (1973), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991). This book is unique in containing a foreword from one of Ireland's most prominent poets, Eavan Boland, and an afterword by Adrienne's long-time friend Jean Valentine. Adrienne Rich has been the recipient of numerous awards including two Guggenheim Fellowships; the Ruth Lilley Poetry Prize (1986), awarded by the Modern Poetry Association and the American Council for the Arts; the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry (1989); the Common Wealth Award in Literature (1991); and the Frost Silver Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement (1992), awarded by the Poetry Society of America. The most recent honour is a MacArthur Fellowship (1994). Adrienne Rich has taught at several major universities in the U.S., most recently Stanford University. She lives in California.

... Read more

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This renowned poet, winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and the 1992 William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement presents poems from 1978 through 1981. Reprint. NYT. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Lovely
I bought this particular collection because the author's work was highly recommended in the books of artist/author/poet Tee Corinne.

I figured it was a not to be missed collection and so it is.

The only thing missing from this slender volume, that I find is often illuminating, is an introduction or afterward from the author.

From the publisher's website -

"In this collection, Ms. Rich has shown both a deep knowledge of her subject, women, and a fine mastery of her craft, timeless contemporary poetry. Above all, she has not abandoned the struggle of 'trying to live/in a clear-headed tenderness' and translating her efforts into critical signposts for those who follow."--Kansas City Star

"We are in the presence here of a major American poet whose voice at mid-century in her own life is increasingly marked by moral passion."--New York Times Book Review

"Rich's poems do not demand the willing suspension of disbelief. They demand belief, and it is a measure of her success as a poet that most of the time they get it. . . . The affirmation and the occasional moments of pure joy in these poems are quiet but fully earned."--Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review

One of our country's most distinguished poets, Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore in l929. Over the last forty years she has published more than sixteen volumes of poetry and four books of nonfiction prose. Rich's work has achieved international recognition and has been translated into German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, and Japanese. She has received numerous awards, fellowships, and prizes, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize for Poetry, the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force, the Lambda Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, the Poet's Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and, most recently, the Dorothea Tanning Prize of the Academy of American Poets and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award (2000). Since l984 she has lived in California.

Lovely

I bought this particular collection because the author's work was highly recommended in books by artist/author/poet Tee Corinne.

I figured it was a not to be missed book and so it is.

The only thing missing from this slender volume, that I find is often illuminating, is an introduction or afterward from the author.

From the publisher's website -

"In this collection, Ms. Rich has shown both a deep knowledge of her subject, women, and a fine mastery of her craft, timeless contemporary poetry. Above all, she has not abandoned the struggle of 'trying to live/in a clear-headed tenderness' and translating her efforts into critical signposts for those who follow."--Kansas City Star

"We are in the presence here of a major American poet whose voice at mid-century in her own life is increasingly marked by moral passion."--New York Times Book Review

"Rich's poems do not demand the willing suspension of disbelief. They demand belief, and it is a measure of her success as a poet that most of the time they get it. . . . The affirmation and the occasional moments of pure joy in these poems are quiet but fully earned."--Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review

One of our country's most distinguished poets, Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore in l929. Over the last forty years she has published more than sixteen volumes of poetry and four books of nonfiction prose. Rich's work has achieved international recognition and has been translated into German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, and Japanese. She has received numerous awards, fellowships, and prizes, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize for Poetry, the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force, the Lambda Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, the Poet's Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and, most recently, the Dorothea Tanning Prize of the Academy of American Poets and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award (2000). Since l984 she has lived in California.

Rich
This book knocks me out.There are poems in here you'll want to commit to memory just to keep her words close to you all of the time.Reading and studying her poetry has made me a smarter woman.

I adore this book, my first of Adrienne Rich's!
Rich's poetry is really very intense. It tends to undulate between being ethereal and straight-forward. The first poem really impressed me... especially the line "Two women sleeping together have more than sleepto defend." I really recommend this book. It was my first of Rich'swork and I've since gotten 3 of her other books and plan on getting morewhen I finish reading them. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

On Lies Secrets and Silence
In this book, one of America's foremost poets and feminist theorists collects her most important prose writings, On Lies Secrets and Silence is an extraordinary sort of travel diary, documenting Rich's lifetime journeys to the frontier and into the interior. It traces the development of one individual consciouusness, "playing over such issues as motherhood, racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of language." It "affirms the potentiality of a lesbian/feminism which extends the meaning of women's love for women to a political vision that touches every nerve ending of society."

Since, by its nature, Rich's journey has not been linear, she has written a headnote for each essay, briefly discussing the circumstances of its writing. "I find in myself both severe and tender thoughts toward the women I have been, whose thoughts I find here."
--- from book's back cover ... Read more

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A major American poet faces her own native land, her own life, and the result is a volume of compelling, transforming poems.The book includes two extraordinary longer works: the self-exploratory "Sources" and "Contradictions—Tracking Poems," an ongoing index of an American woman's life.

The poet writes, "In these poems I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak of a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased. I believe more than ever that the search for justice and compassion is the great wellspring for poetry in our time, throughout the world, though the theme of despair has been canonized in this country. I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so."
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The most conflicted, most rewarding book from the #1 poet
As of this writing, *Your Native Land...* is ranked in the 250,000 range on Amazon's rankings of books bought.My suspicion is that most volumes of this book start in poetry classes or women's reading groups, and find their way to other people close to the readers' hearts.

This volume contains four poems--two long, two shorter--which have made a big impact on this reader and many others.The two long poems which bracket the volume are "Sources," which evokes Rich's conflicted Jewish heritage, and "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," which works outward from the poet's lifelong struggle with serious arthritic pain to propose connections between "the body's pain and the pain on the streets."In both of these long poems, Rich makes her particular experiences serve as a framework for addressing the struggles of a range of people, including her 1970s constituency of American women but moving outward to engage with people across the world.That the poet must do this is the message of her poem "North American Time," which readers of earlier Rich poems might see as a rebuke to those poems' assumed facts about people's experiences.North American Time makes clear that the poet's intentions in the moment of writing may not last, but that the effects of those words does last:"we move/ but our words stand/ become responsible//and this is verbal privilege." In this poem, Rich makes her "privilege" one of a continuous witnessing of the lives of those around her (and far away, in other countries),in which the poet's language has to reflect these specifics.

In "In the Wake of Home," though, Rich gives a painfully sad and affecting picture of American middle-class home life and its losses.Atthe heart of home, she writes, is a "hole torn and patched over again."The connections Rich makes between this kind of pain "in the wake of home" and the much ! larger-scale violences of slavery and homelessness are not ! as convincing as similar connections made elsewhere in the volume;still, this poem shows Rich's conflicted approach to the problems of poetry she works to define throughout the volume, an approach of immense responsibility and power. ... Read more

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"Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it means, to stand fast; what it means to move." In these astonishing new poems, Adrienne Rich dares to look and to extend her poetic language as witness to the treasures--the midnight salvage--we rescue from fear and fragmentation. Rich's work has long challenged social plausibilities built on violence and demoralizing power. In Midnight Salvage, she continues her explorations at the end of the century, trying, as she has said, "to face the terrible with hope, in language as complex as necessary, as communicative as possible--a poetics which can work as antidote to complacency, self-involvement, and despair. I have wanted to assume a theater of voices rather than the restricted I. To write for both readers I know exist and those I can only imagine, finding their own salvaged beauty as I have found mine."Amazon.com Review
W.H. Auden chose Adrienne Rich for the Yale Younger Poet serieswhen she was a mere 21. In Midnight Salvage, a half century later,in an act part homage, part defiance, Rich challenges the reader toreconsider whether poetry matters:

if a woman as vivid as any artist
can fling any day herself from the 14th floor

would it relieve you to decide Poetry
doesn't make this happen?

Daring in their passion to inform and incite,these poems remind us that complacency is never anoption. "I wanted to go somewhere / the brain had not yet gone," sheconfessesin "Letters to a Young Poet." Midnight Salvage is evidence of adestination reached. --Martha Silano ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

vague but worth it
As much as some reviewers on here denounce Rich as elitist and too heady (when they themselves seem much nearer that criticism than does Rich), she is an amazing crafter of language.Yah, she is vague, and yah she is almost impossible to follow sometimes, but enjoy it.You play with them, throw em around in your head and figure out the meanings.Poems aren't always meant to be straightforward (though some would argue with that) and there's a pleasure in that.These are puzzles, and if you don't have the patience for puzzles then you need to reconsider buying this book.

"Rising From the Wreck"
Adrienne Rich's twenty-second book arrives in her seventieth year on the planet and the fiftieth year of a distinguished literary career. To scan the list of publications prefacing her seventeenth collection of poems is to feel small jolts of recognition - one title recalling the moment when your sense of what it meant to be a daughter, wife, mother, self, or mind abruptly veered into dangerous new territory, and another evoking a whole decade of the American century. How bracing her tenacity has been, and how courageous her changes.

In 1951, at the age of twenty-two, Rich received the coveted Yale Younger Poets award for poems W. H. Auden patted on the back because they "are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, [and] respect their elders." Twelve years later her "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" shocked readers with its broken prosodies and epiphanies of women's experience in a sexist society. "Diving Into the Wreck" (1973), "The Dream of a Common Language" (1978), "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far" (1981), "Your Native Land, Your Life" (1993), and "The Dark Fields of the Republic" (1995) have established Rich as an activist writer of impressive reach and power. Despite crippling rheumatoid arthritis and looming despair at the degradations of language and the sociopolitical scene at the millennium, she's still here. Still talking.

And still making waves: two years ago Rich refused the President's prestigious National Medal for the Arts because of what she called, in a speech at the University of Massachusetts, the fracturing of our social contract by "the omnivorously acquisitive few" who preside over "a dwindling middle class and a multiplying number of ill-served, throwaway citizens and workers." While many readers honor Rich's public stance against injustice, some deplore the entrance of such themes into her poetry, arguing that art must transcend the political to be universal and enduring.

In Rich's case, what transcends politics is the voice at the center of her work: an ethical consciousness in the act of resolutely finding a way through terrible difficulties. Refusing to be distracted, she thinks and feels along the labyrinth, fully aware that whatever waits around the bend - barricade, abyss, torturer's knife, knowledge - can kill the spirit. The thing can't be foreseen or forestalled, either, without compromising the whole endeavor. Yet "Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it / means, to stand fast; what it means to move."

"Midnight Salvage" is muted and elliptical because the experiences of individuals and the forces impinging on them have become harder to pinpoint. They're like water to a fish trying to identify the medium that presses evenly on all sides and supplies all sustenance. The home we live and breathe in is inchoately oppressive - a supersaturated marketplace where events, ideas, rights, governments, peoples, selves, health, oceans, the air, and the words that might tell them true are traded like consumables. Can we know the water we swim in? Rich writes less to galvanize or muster than to awaken.

So the poems read like bulletins from an elusive front, most of them linked in loose bluesy sequences, and punctuated by gaps or paired colons reminiscent of empty boxes - for the disappeared, perhaps, for all the solid assurances that have melted into air. Brilliant glimpses remind us why we want to be awake and alive, like the osprey rising over foggy Tomales Bay and its young "in the windy nest / creaking there in their hunger," and like the older woman's amazed, half-protective-half-exultant memory of her adolescent self:

"What a girl I was then what a body / ready for breaking / open like a lobster / what a little provincial village � / what a book I made myself / what a quicksilver study � / What a girl pelican-skimming over fear what a mica lump splitting / into tiny sharp-edged mirrors through which / the sun's eclipse could seem normal � / eager to sink / to be found / what a mass of swimmy legs"

When "You cannot eat an egg / You don't know where it's been," still, "Unstupefied not unhappy / we braise wild greens and garlic / feed the feral cats / and when the fog's irregular documents break open / scan its fissures for young stars."

One or two catalogs seem facile, a few formal repetitions verge on sentimentality ("I'll find you � I find you"; "I would look long � long I'd look"), but these are cavils. An original voice and a scrupulously precise, penetrating mind are still on the urgent prowl, "seizing the light / of creation / giving it back to its creatures // headed under the earth."

a response
This is not a review, but a response to one. To the reviewer who called this book "mediocre" I want to say thanks, not for damning this writer but for being opinionated. I find too many reviwers are blandly admiring in their opinions (as I believe the case is with the first customer's review of this book). And this person also takes care to praise Rich when it is deserved. I have long been intrigued by Rich, her political stance (which seems to supplant her personality and her poetry) and the way it has made her poems. I read this aforementioned review to get an idea of how good or bad the book may be, and to get an idea of how Rich is perceived. I got my answer.

I love reading this book
Adrienne Rich is one of my favorite poets ever.Everytime I read a new poem, or book by ACR, I learn something new.I take whatever she writeswith the utmost seriousness because I know that she is a writer that takesher craft seriously. Rich combines the usual separate domains of poetry andphilosophy.Is it "poetic philosophy" or "philosophicalpoetry"? I go with the latter; her work has the aesthetic beauty of aWallace Stevens with the philosophical rigor of a writer utterly aware ofher place and time.She is a true American writer, that refuses to use the"canonical" American writers only; she also uses Miles Davis,Muriel Rukesyer, John Coltrane and Julia de Burgos as her guides.Thisbook is very good.

Not Rich at her best, and that means pretty mediocre
Each one of the commercially prepared reviews above contains more verbal invention than what you will find in this book. I really don't see why Auden is continually brought up, since he gave Rich the very faintestpraise ever accorded to any writer at any time in his/herstory('respectsher elders', etc.) This book has Rich again talking about very personalmatters, such as her stint at Stanford. There is no question that she haslost her unusual ability to make socially important observations sting, butthis is the soupiest collection from her yet. I'm really disappointed, andwould like to return this book if I could. There are, of course, compellinglesbian poets out there, and it is a shame the way Rich now preempts nearlyall of them. Where it says here "Readers also bought booksby....", you might take a look at Boland, an interesting Irish poet,not so tired as Rich appears to be. ... Read more

Product Description
Now in its ninth year, The Best American Poetry is universally acclaimed as the best anthology in the field. The compilation includes a diverse abundance of poems published in 1995 in more than 40 publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Bamboo Ridge.Amazon.com Review
Adrienne Rich proves to be the most inclusive editor thus farin the Best American Poetry series, drawing from a number ofwriters and journals whose work had not been represented in earlierinstallments. Of course, established poets such as AliciaOstriker and W.S. Merwinare present, alongside newcomers like Ray A. Young Bear and Latif AsadAbdullah. The poems range from the funny (Beth Ann Fennelly's unrhymedsonnet), to the sexy (Deborah Stein'ssteamy contribution), to the poignant (a posthumous inclusion from Jane Kenyon). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

The best of this series
I read all of the Best of ... Poetry until about 2000 when I found the quality had really deteriorated.The series was uneven at best, but the 1996 edition was full of wonderful poetry.I might not find Adrienne Rich's politics or poetry particularly agreeable but her critical sense is impeccable.

Wish I could give it less than 1 star....
Fundamentally, this is the dullest, least interesting collection of poetry I've ever seen.And it's deeply hypocritical of Rich as well; her own poetry reveals a woman who is aware not only of feminist and multicultural criticism, but who is also well-versed in the strengths and mysteriespoetry can offer. ..................... There isn't a single piece worth readingin the entire book.

disappointing
It seems like cultural and gender identities are becoming more important than literature itself when it comes to literary criticism.I am very concerned about people who sees this anthology as a victory of thefeminists and the multiculturalists over the so called 'predominantly whitemale society'.A good literature should appeal to some universalexperiences that we in some way understand as human beings.This is whyHomer and Li-Po(or Rihaku) appeals to us even to this day, despite the factthat they lived in a different cultural settings.As T. S. Eliot says,"Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape frompersonality".A good writer knows that it is what is 'behind theexperience that is significant, not the specific content of the experience. To the extent one understands this, they realize the significance ofwriting 'impersonal poetry' that appeals to all kinds of people in anyperiod of time, so long as they have the intelligence to understand this. It is disappointing to see that even this prestigious anthology would fallinto the victim of feminism and multiculturalism, because it is one of thefew anthologies out there that offers some genuine poetry.

disappointing
It seems like cultural and gender identities are becoming more important than literature itself when it comes to literary criticism.I am very concerned about people who sees this anthology as a victory of thefeminists and the multiculturalists over the so called 'predominantly whitemale society'.It is disappointing to see that even this prestigiousanthology would fall into the victim of feminism and multiculturalism,because it is one of the few anthologies out there that offers some genuinepoetry.

disappointing
It seems like cultural and gender identities are becoming more important than literature itself when it comes to literary criticism.I am very concerned about people who sees this anthology as a victory of feministsand multiculturalists over the so called 'predominantly white malesociety'.A good literature should appeal to some universal experiencesthat we in some way understand as human beings.This is why Homer andLi-Po(or Rihaku) appeals to us even to this day, despite the fact that theylived in a different cultural settings.As T. S. Eliot says, "Poetryis not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality". A good writer knows that it is what is 'behind the experience that issignificant, not the specific content of the experience.To the extent oneunderstands this, they realize the significance of writing 'impersonalpoetry' that appeals to all kinds of people in any period of time, so longas they have the intelligence to understand this.It is disappointing tosee that even this prestigious anthology would fall into the victim offeminism and multiculturalism, because it is one of the few anthologies outthere that offers some genuine poetry. ... Read more

Product Description
A new book of poems by one of America's mostdistinguished poets."When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?" asks Adrienne Rich in Dark Fields of the Republic, her major new work. Her explorations go to the heart of democracy and love, and the historical and present endangerment of both.

The poems of Dark Fields of the Republic are a theater of voices: of men and women, the dead and the living, over time and across continents. Rich writes out of conversations actual and imaginary, actions taken for better or for worse, out of histories and songs, humdrum and terrible events, out of the most intimate loves and love for the world. Through these poems, she extends the poet's reach of witness and power of connection, and invites the reader-listener to participate.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good, but has she lost her relevance?
I have long been an admirer of Rich's beautiful poetry and ideas.Even though a male reader, I have found her company through her books over theyears some of the best.However, in this volume, there is a real lack ofvision.Rich comes accross at times like a parody of herself and hercauses--instead of celebrating the victories, she acts as if she is hiddenand on-the-run.This attitude hurts this otherwise interesting book.Hermeditations on aging that appear throughout several poems in this volumeare affecting and exciting, but there is still something missing.Ifyou've never read Rich before, start with the works of the seventies; ifyou have read and loved Rich, then pick this up and settle in with a dear,if slightly crusty, slightly out-of-touch old friend. ... Read more