What Is Found There

October 4, 1993
`` You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it. '' Rich ( An Atlas of the Difficult World ) seems to do as she says, and that's partly why her work is so powerful. This collection of her essays, notebook excerpts and letters shares the poet's thinking and her passion. Rich writes not only about poetry as a literary entity but about our need for it as a force for personal truth and political action. She is not prescriptive. Instead, she urges democracy in poetry, a broadening of possibilities, and suggests poetry--``a social art''--as a means of larger change, ``pulling us toward each other.'' The pieces here do some of that pulling. Rich discusses the place of poetry in shopping malls; the livelihoods of poets; their education; Muriel Rukeyser as a neglected master; Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as progenitors and ``extremists'' of American poetry; and the influence of Wallace Stevens on her own work. But regardless of topic, Rich continually affirms poetry as a way of reawakening ``desire and need'' long suppressed or forgotten by many. Her conviction also reawakens, offering hope toughened by experience.

December 1, 2003
As timely and insightful now as it was when published after the first Gulf conflict, this reprint of the 1993 original includes an excellent new introduction titled "Jacob and the Angel" and a post-9/11 piece called "Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture." Through her journals, letters, and reflections on the work of other poets, Rich explores the relationship between poetry and politics, the private and the public. How do we make meaning in a world filled with endless distraction and noise, where every fear and desire is co-opted before it has been fully realized? Faced with this clamor, how are we to act as rational beings capable of making sound decisions and thus as responsible citizens? Poems are not recipes for sanity, argues Rich, but rather artifacts born of a process that allows us to "engage with states that themselves would deprive us of languages and reduce us to passive sufferers"-heartbreak, loss, and great physical pain. Revisiting poems can allow the reader to reengage with these states, make sense of them, and carry that sense to the public realm. A timely choice for academic and public libraries.-Felicity D. Walsh, Southern Polytechnic State Univ., Marietta, GA

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.