In poems written since 1991, Rich conceives a spare but variegated poetic landscape where the borders of politics, art and personal relationships dissolve to unloose disembodied, truth-telling voices: "...this is not somewhere else but here,/ our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,/ its own ways of making people disappear." Two sections, "What Kind of Times Are These" and "Then Or Now," explore the individual mind's impress on the world, sometimes drawing from the lives of political visionaries and intellectuals. In the 10-part poem, "Calle Vision," a real place becomes a topography of human memory and imagination. Ideas ("surely the love of life is never-ending") undulate with imagistic details ("a cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds") in poems with often shorter lines than in her last book, An Atlas of the Difficult World; forms like couplets and quatrains are also more frequently used here. Distilled to shorthand, this is political, deeply personal poetry that emerges from Rich's experience of the world's horrors and beauty, and her knowledge that "The beauty of darkness/ is how it lets you see."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
"This is not somewhere else but here,/our country moving closer to its own truth and dread," warns Rich in the grand, admonitory poem that opens her 20th collection. But this new work is not thoroughgoingly foreboding despite "acceptable levels of cruelty, steadily rising." Rich displays omnivorous avidity ("Whatever you bring in your hands I need to see it"); sure, pure imagery from "this my labyrinthine filmic brain"; testiness "because in times like these/to have you listen at all, it's necessary/to talk about trees"; and even occasional, incremental succor: "and yes, you can feel happy/with just one piece of your heart." Both particular and portentous, these poems continue the testament of one of our most committed poets, who reflects in the volume's closing strophes, "These are the extremes I stoke/into the updraft of this life/still roaring/into the thinnest air." Highly recommended.?Thomas Tavis, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
