Your Native Land, Your Life [Paperback]

Adrienne Rich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 1993

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."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Rich's new book, the latest product of 35 years of exploration of one of art's most demanding media, is a study in experience, politics and altruism. Rich, who might well have succeeded as a conventional poet, has instead dedicated her life to a poetry that is knowing, humane, gut-wrenching, useful and true. At heart she is possessed of the idea that if we can begin to know ourselvesin her case as woman, Jew, Americanwe can know others as well. The result is a voice synonymous with the voice of ordinary Americans, with the middle class and the poor, with the disenfranchised. This is the best of Rich's booksher continuing growth and development make each of her new books her best.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In this book Rich outlines the terms of a life that chose her as much as she chose it. "Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside history" and "everything we write will be used against us." Ever self-critical, she is compelled to bear witness for the abused and unspeakable in our time. She is "sick of drift" and acknowledges the frustration of the poet who records ways "the wounded teach each other." Rich's characteristic outspokenness is here, but metamorphosed into compassion. These poems display the battle scars of trying to complete unfinished business, take the woman, poet, daughter, "Jew in solitude" out of the closet. Rich has passed beyond harangue and found another kind of political voice, very seasoned and moving. A major work. Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, English Dept. , Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 17, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393310825
• ISBN-13: 978-0393310825
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,284,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most conflicted, most rewarding book from the #1 poet, July 25, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Your Native Land, Your Life (Paperback)

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. <! P>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. At the 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.