The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 [Hardcover]

Adrienne Rich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2004

Adrienne Rich described as 'the elder stateswoman of American poetry' (Jeanette Winterson, The Daily Telegraph) here offers a new collection of passionately fierce yet musical poems. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ('Not of course here') learn amid violence and hatred, 'when the whole town flinches/ blood on the undersole thickening to glass.' 'Usonian Journals 2000' intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/ utopic vision. Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right in a collection of vigorous lyric poems about the first four years of the twenty-first century, a period of terror, war, corporate imperialism, outrageous lies, and miasmal inarticulateness. A moment in history, Rich avers, in arresting imagery and flinty syntax, in which language has been processed into banality just like so much of the American landscape. Forthright, precise, witty, and keenly attuned to complacency, reluctance, and fear, Rich fights back with exhilaratingly choreographed poems about inane, high-pitched public cell-phone conversations, television's numbing soundtrack, the crude oversimplification and commercialization of public discourse, and the "viral / spread of social impotence producing social silence." Rich also writes piercingly, and inevitably, of war, most poignantly in the powerful title poem, in which a courageous teacher in a besieged city tells his students, "Don't let your faces turn to stone / Don't stop asking me why." Similarly, Rich tells readers not to give up hope and not to remain silent, because truth flows unabated behind the facade of spin and babble, and it will prevail. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Adrienne Rich is one of the most provocative voices on politics of sexuality, race, language, power, and women's culture. The author of almost twenty volumes of poetry, she is a widely recognised and celebrated poet.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (September 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393059839
• ISBN-13: 978-0393059830
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,097,140 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A pearl cast before at least one swine, October 14, 2006

By 

Dorothy Parker's aunt - See all my reviews

This review is from: The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (Paperback)

No greater poet exists. The School Among the Ruins is her best work in years--she is at the top of her game. This is taut, lyric poetry. Beautiful in form and thought. And, as always with Rich, informed by excellent ethics and motives. She is a poet who has successfully challenged social injustice with her poetry. She doesn't have to justify herself to anyone--certainly not the reviewer from Ohio--but I feel I must.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rich continues to surprise..., August 21, 2008

By 

Raymond L. Heinrich (TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (Paperback)

In 1988 my ardent feminist girlfriend gave me a copy of "The Fact of a Doorframe" (the 1984 edition) and told me not to speak to her again until I finished reading it. This seemed an odd request, but since I really wanted to speak to her again, I read it. Rich's uncompromising passion not only moved me; it started a process that changed my view of the world and ended up changing my life. I guess you should expect that from a writer this powerful. She never fails to surprise me. This book is no exception.

P.S. I particularly love "Your Native Land, Your Life", "The Dream of a Common Language", and "What is Found There". ("What is Found There" is supposed to be essays and letters but it seems like poetry to me.)

13 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars There's so much better out there..., April 27, 2005

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (Hardcover)

Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins (Norton, 2004)

One of the blurbs on the jacket of Adrienne Rich's latest book proclaims Rich one of the poets whose every new book is cause for excitement. I can think of at least an hundred others for whom that should be true, and Rich is not one of them, especially if The School Among the Ruins is anything to go by.

It's obvious from some of the pieces here that Rich does know, or at least remember, that image should be the heart of all poetry; in the rest, however, she seems to have completely forgotten that fact, descending to the realm of political prose broken up into little lines to make it artistic. Little lines do not make poetry. Image makes poetry, and there is precious little of it to be found here. You'd be better off turning to one of the books by one of those poets whose every new work should be cause for excitement (Charles Simic, Ira Sadoff, Ted Kooser, Rochelle Theo Pienn, Debra Allbery, Heather McHugh, Elizabeth Willis, Peter Gizzi, and Dzvinia Orlowsky all come to mind very quickly), leaving this for once you've exhausted the rest of your local library's new releases shelf for poetry. **