Review by Booklist Review
Rich's poems have always been as complex, polished, and subtly kinetic as a pebble beach, singing with the force of waves and wind, and her newest book is even more potent and startlingly beautiful than what has gone before, as though Rich has descended into the molten core of the planet and the center of our tormented soul. She sees the earth as inlaid with bones, saturated with the salty fluids of the flesh and the heart, and haloed with the prayers of memory. Her language is incandescent, and her musings encompass all time and all people, infinite suffering and blessed liberation. She ponders the tension between our devotion to beauty and intimacy with brutality, writing of people who dwelled both in the magic of art and in the harsh arena of war, including the revolutionary photographer Tina Modotti and the poet and Resistance fighter ReneChar. And in every poem, Rich holds us to the flame of her compassion and to the glint of her sharp vision of the terrible glory that is life. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Rich's tough, impressive, earnest new volumeher 17th book of poemsconcentrates on Rich's past selves and their varied goals and causes. Her well-known, fiercely held political idealsher commitments to economic justice, feminism and gay liberationmanifest themselves, now, in her sense of passing the torch, of trying to show the readers and writers who will come after her what she has learned and how she learned it. Her juxtaposed fragments, self-questionings and self-interruptions, and taut, Anglo-Saxonate verse lines, let her sound accessible, democratic, inspiring, while making us work to discover her poems' formal secrets. Most of the poems are sequences. "Plaza Street and Flatbush" and "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" explore Brooklyn and Manhattan through the eyes and in the voices of Rich's ancestors and culture-heroes: Paul Goodman, Julia de Burgos, Hart Crane. The superbly bizarre, self-interrogating triptych "Seven Skins" runs through figures amazing to Rich's college-age self, while the more ambitious, eight-section "Midnight Salvage" sorts through bits and images from Rich's past, from the moon between Monterey pines, through memories of Rome (frustrating) and Rich's solidarity with other activists "when I ate and drank liberation," to the risks of polluted food. She continues to blur the boundaries between public slogan-forging and private self-searching: "Old walls the pride of architects collapsing/ find us in crazed niches sleeping like foxes/ we wanters we unwanted we/ wanted for the crime of being ourselves." Rich's admirers will recognize the complex symbiosis, here as in her other recent works, between the activist and the maker of new language, each propelling, describing, provoking the other's words. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Rich's latest collection cuts another notch in the tree of 20th-century history and marks its place on the path toward a poetics of social responsibility. A montage of wordplay and direct historical reference (with endnotes) conveys the necessity for patienceÄ"horrible patience which is part of the work...which waits for language, for meaning" and freedom of expression. The book amplifies the message we have seen in Rich's work for nearly 50 years. She masterfully presents "all kinds of language" in tone and in content, incorporating the ideas of Blake, Mandelstam, Marx, and Nixon (among others) into a medley setting forth the imperative that historical events be synthesized and expressed in poetry. What she describes as "a theater of voices rather than the restrictive I" is a movement of perspective within the poems and throughout the book. The result is a musical text that is liberating in content and in form.ÄAnn K. van Buren, New York University (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ever since her first volume of poetry in 1951, A Change of World, was selected by Auden for the Yale Younger Poets, Rich has enjoyed a wide and mostly laudatory readership, though it has changed over the years, from admirers of her modest, formal pleasures to believers in her often strident, anti-male rhetoric. Age seems to find her more mellow in these poems from the last three years, though her sociopolitical concerns remain the same, as they have for many of her 19 or so books: a committed radical, Rich engages her readers directly, anticipating objections to her sense of art as intervention and witness. 'A Long Conversation' is just that: a lengthy dialogue, performed for her public, with no lesser figures than Marx, Wittgenstein, Enzensberger, and Guevera'all duly and dully quoted in service of Rich's self-aggrandizing bits of comradely memory. Having long abandoned the jaded views of Auden for the democratic vistas of Whitman, Rich the prophet struggles with Rich the proselytizer: she strolls an urban dreamscape in ''The Night Has a Thousand Eyes',' and summons the ghosts of Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, and Paul Goodman, among others. Other poems celebrate'despite her admitted tendency to 'iconize''activists and artists, Rene Char and Tina Modotti. Everywhere Rich bleeds history, whether imagining those hiding from Nazis, or sorting out her own dead mother's personal effects. Best when plaintive and sensitive to the modest pleasures of her sounds, Rich's 'I''less lines, with their pretentious denial of ego, sound more like the breathless phrases of George Bush.
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