Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970 - Softcover

Rich, Adrienne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393313859 ISBN 13: 9780393313857

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995

Synopsis

More than 200 poems collected from Adrienne Rich's first six books, plus a dozen others of those decades.

From their first publication, when Rich was twenty-one, in the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series, the successive volumes of her poetry have both charted the growth of her own mind and vision and mirrored our tempestuous, unsettled age. Her unmistakable voice, speaking even from the earliest poems with rare assurance and precision, wrestles with urgent questions while never failing to explore new poetic territory.

In Collected Early Poems, readers will once again bear witness to Rich's triumphant assertion of the centrality of poetry in our intertwined personal and political lives.

About this title

About the Author

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed, and widely taught, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose. Her constellation of honors includes two National Book Awards, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Ms. Rich’s volumes of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. Her prose includes the essay collections On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and the nonfiction book Of Woman Born, which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. In 2010, she was honored with The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award.

From Publishers Weekly

The latest volume from this distinguished poet ( An Atlas of the Difficult World ) contains all of the work included in Rich's first six books, and a few previously uncollected pieces as well. Her poetry of the 1950s stems from a strong, mostly male tradition, obviously and intentionally echoing the work of Frost, Williams, Dickinson and Stevens. These poems read easily and beautifully; Rich's language is cautious and well crafted, almost painfully perfect in its rhyme schemes and rhythms. She does not focus on distinctly female experience, but speaks instead of the more universal struggle of humanity in a "disordered, fragmentary world." Over time, Rich's style becomes more divergent and forceful; it gathers narrative threads and experiments with irregular rhythms, line breaks and pauses. She writes of the struggle of the socially marginal in a world where there are definite limits to growth and boundaries to thought: "I am a woman . . . feeling the fullness of her powers / at the precise moment when she must not use them." The poems written in the 1960s are pervaded by the poet's consciousness of the subversive nature of creativity, especially for women, a gift at risk of being suppressed or curtailed at any moment by the self, family or the male-dominated society. In the last poems of the period, Rich's voice is firm and brave, her language still searingly beautiful and individual. This important volume charts the radical transformation of one of America's most significant poets.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0393313859
• ISBN 13: 9780393313857
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 458