Review by Booklist Review
For all the awards that trail Rich's name the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the National Book Critics Award for The School among the Ruins (2004), the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award she is still a quicksilver poet, by turns sensuous and outraged, reflective and cutting. For all their burnished intensity, her new poems are airy and prismatic, and the gravitas of her compassionate worldview does not preclude intimacy or mischief. As Rich constructs piquant shelter-in-the-storm scenarios, and neatly pins down the chemistry of yearning and loneliness, she unveils the intricate nexus of the ancient and the current ( bardic or technological / together dialectical ), and traces our wanderings in the great labyrinth of human dreams and history. In Behind the Motel, a woman shuts a phone in a drawer, while outside a child taunts a horned beast made from mist. An excerpt from Sappho is aligned with Hubble space photographs to startling effect as Rich, poet of the tactile and the cosmic, writes of the heat of iced vodka, time bending, and life and love prevailing.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Rich, who won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1951 and who has published more than 25 books since, continues, in this unsparing collection, to make inquiries into real injustice and fables of its vanquishment: "loose floorboards quitting in haste we pried/ up to secrete the rash imagination/ of a time to come." The penchant that this great American poet has for dating her books and her individual poems feels less like an attempt to situate them within history than a means to shock the self, and readers, into recognizing what has passed, and is passing: "smolder's legacy on a boulder traced." Rich's stark, intimate voice seems to speak for a life lived at once at the margins and at the center. Some poems linger in diaristic dailiness ("My neighbor moving/ in a doorframe moment's/ reach of her hand"); others light out for the territory where possibilities are extinguished, and born: "beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death// or life/ rage/ for order, rage for destruction//-beyond this love which stirs/ the air every time she walks into the room." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Two years seems a short amount of time for a poetry collection to span, but for a writer as prolific as Rich, it is ample. Rich won the Yale Award for Younger Poets in 1951 and has not slowed down since. Her 1974-77 collection, The Dream of a Common Language, is an American poetry classic. Her verse burns with enough intensity and focus to make awkward labels like "free verse," "the personal is political," and "confessional poetry" redemptive compliments. This new experimental collection shows a bold, evocative imagist at work, and, as with blues singers, Rich's voice has only improved with age and remains incandescent and compelling. Take, for example, her asking amid a war poem, "is this how far we have come/ to make love easy?" or referring to universities as "the gaunt architecture of cheap solutions." This is not the only Rich book to have in your collection, but for those already invested, it makes a fine addition.-Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL (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.
