"Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right."--Booklist, starred review
In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 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. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.
The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004
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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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
One of a handful of major American poets whose every new work is a cause for excitement…stunning. -- Library Journal
This is Rich's best work in years. … Demonstrates why Rich is considered a major poet. -- Christian Science Monitor
This kind of writing is hard work … but we are fortunate to have Rich in the trenches. -- Sarah Goodyear, Time Out New York
Whether lamenting…modern culture or…the war on terror, Rich remains a poet of impeccable principle and unwavering conscience. -- San Francisco Weekly
This is Rich's best work in years. … Demonstrates why Rich is considered a major poet. -- Christian Science Monitor
This kind of writing is hard work … but we are fortunate to have Rich in the trenches. -- Sarah Goodyear, Time Out New York
Whether lamenting…modern culture or…the war on terror, Rich remains a poet of impeccable principle and unwavering conscience. -- San Francisco Weekly
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.)
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.)
14 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format: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. **
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. **
