An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (Paperback)

~ Adrienne Rich (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The heart of Adrienne Rich's award-winning collection beats in its title sequence, 13 poems charting "An Atlas of the Difficult World." Like Atlas, who bears Earth on his shoulders, Rich bears--and wields--an enormous political consciousness. These poems find her struggling to say what is honest and true, resisting easy answers, having the ambition to risk everything; these are the energies for which her readers return. For example, after deriding as solipsistic the poetry of Richard Hugo, she writes:

I wonder if this is a white man's madness.
I honor your truth and refuse to leave it at that.
What have I learned from stories of the hunt, of lonely men in gangs?
But there were other stories...

Rich knows that mere political poetry has a quick expiration date. Her genius enables her to speak to the moment and to posterity simultaneously. "Catch if you can your country's moment, begin / where any calendar's ripped-off: Appomattox / Wounded Knee, Los Alamos / Selma, the last airlift from Saigon," she exhorts at one point, tuning the present to its history like Muriel Rukeyser or Ezra Pound. Early in the book Rich praises "those needed to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments ... the meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate woman, the desperate man / --never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair," but wonders who will continue this work in the America she has witnessed. "It cannot be done without them / and where are they now?" With this, her 21st book, her echo returns the answer. --Edward Skoog

From Publishers Weekly

Rich's 13th collection of poems is mostly a free-verse montage on America's broken promises and latent possibilities ("This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms / This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms"). The work jarringly evokes a country fissured by poverty, loneliness, oppression of women, a nation that has not met the human needs of its citizens. Fulfilling her definition of a patriot as one who "wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being," Rich mingles the personal and political in forthright meditations on the world's anguish and beauty. Intermittently rising to powerful moments, this tapestry of the world's disenfranchised and downtrodden fails to coalesce into a unified whole.
Copyright 1991 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: 72 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.; First Edition edition (December 17, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393308316
• ISBN-13: 978-0393308310
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #504,938 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The signal work of an important American poet, February 9, 2001

By	"joshisimo" (Somerville, MA United States) - See all my reviews

I'm surprised no substantial reviews of *Atlas* have been posted, as anyone who has read it knows that Rich's survey of American life during the Gulf War era (in the title poem) is an unforgettable document of our time. Rich is known as a feminist writer and radical critic, and that impression scares off undergraduates for whom feminism is too loaded a term. This book, especially the title poem, "Eastern War Time," and "Tattered Kaddish," shows that Rich's feminist insight does not limit her attention--or relevance--to women subjects and readers.

Many lines from "An Atlas of the Difficult World" stay with me, but from its final section, I'll give this as an example of how Rich strives to find in her readers equal partners, sharing her task of representing all of American life:

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are... I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

Rich sees her readers as stripped of innocence, of the ability to make casual assumptions about their lives in America and the world. But these poems offer the gift of understanding our current state, and of a beautiful, surprisingly generous description of us all.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars American Poetry Lovers Must-read, April 16, 2008

By	Barbie (KY) - See all my reviews

An Atlas of the Difficult World is a must-read for Adrienne Rich fans or anyone interested in contemporary American poetry. This volume is surprisingly short (only 60 pages long), but the material seems rather dense (in my opinion). This volume of poetry is broken into two sections. The first section is the longer poem "An Atlas of the Difficult World" that is broken into thirteen parts. The second section is comprised of twelve shorter poems. A couple of works in section II titled "Eastern War Time" and "Through Corralitos under Rolls of Cloud" are broken into smaller parts. This volume of poetry deals with political issues such as war, the establishment of a female identity, and difficult subjects such as abuse, murder, and anti-Semitism. There are a few poems in this collection that definitely stand out for me. "Eastern War Time" parts 1-6 show young Jewish girls trying to find out who they are in the midst of WWII: "what's an American girl / in wartime...ignorantly Jewish / trying to grasp the world / through books" (lines 2-3, 6-8). Another touching poem in this collection is "Tattered Kaddish," which embodies the bitter irony of singing praises to life when so many are suffering: "Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel / on ones we knew and loved" (lines 6-7). Part one of "An Atlas of the Difficult World" contains a short stanza that captures a horrific scene of abuse. Yet the speaker wishes to turn a deaf ear ("I don't want to hear") to such "devastation." This selection left me with an image I find hard to forget. For anyone who does not take poetry seriously, this collection will not be worth the time. Although many of the poems seem to have a clear message, I feel that some of the works require the reader's attention, devotion, and close reading to fully appreciate the messages Rich is divulging. True American poetry aficionados will value this great volume of poetry.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "There are roads to take.", March 22, 2001

By	G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I have revisited this book many times since it was published ten years ago. In her 13-poem collection, Rich turns her penetrating poet's gaze to "the difficult world"--malathion strawberries (p. 3), missiles in the desert (p. 5), silence (p. 10), car graveyards (p. 11), waste (p. 11), Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma (p. 12), death on the Appalachian Trail (p. 14), and loneliness (p. 19). These are not "feel-good" poems, and the title poem is stronger than others.

"These are not the roads you know me by," she writes in her Whitman-like title poem, "but the woman driving, walking, watching from life and death is the same" (p. 5). As these poems reveal, Rich writes with stunning honesty from her heart, soul, and the marrow of her bones (p. 51).

G. Merritt