From Publishers Weekly
One of the most admired poets of the American left, Rukeyser (1914–1980) is in the midst of a revival: this enormous collection should help keep the spotlight on her work. Rukeyser's early poems (1935's
Theory of Flight, 1938's
U.S. 1) melded modernist surfaces with outspoken Popular Front politics. The best known (and best) of her many sequences, "The Book of the Dead" (1938), chronicles corporate negligence at a West Virginia construction project: "Almost as soon as work was begun in the tunnel/ men began to die among dry drills." As her star waned after the Second World War, she continued to enunciate bold hopes: "Let me tell you what I have known all along," she asked in 1949: "meaning of poetry and personal love,/ a world of peace and freedom." Later odes and longer poems praised Rukeyser's heroes, among them Kathe Kollwitz, Herman Melville, the Jewish folk-hero Rabbi Akiba, the New England entrepreneur Timothy Dexter and the physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs. Though the would-be mythic poems she produced in the 1950s are now hard to read, her decade of work returned to her fiery strengths; drawing her forms, at times, from tribal chants, her energies from protest movements, Rukeyser hoped to "recognize at the other edge of ocean/ a new kind of man a new kind of woman."
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Rukeyser (1916-80) was as committed to seeking justice as she was to writing poetry, and she believed in poetry as a transformational force. She wrote about war, the dire fate of silica miners in West Virginia, the tyranny of class and racism, and the nature and significance of womanhood from such a strikingly independent viewpoint that both the Left and the Right found her controversial. Rukeyser's supple, often Whitmanesque, gracefully outspoken poems possess a planed-smooth dignity, a drive toward testimony and story, a feel for science, a love of art, and a profound sense of connection with humankind. By gathering together 12 previously published books, beginning with
Theory of Flight (1935) and ending with
The Gates (1976), as well as retrieving translations and juvenilia, the editors of this invaluable volume have made accessible a major American poet and a soulful humanist. "Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me," Rukeyser writes, thus stating the key to her empathy and her striking gift for erasing the line between the personal and the political.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
