Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995

by Adrienne Rich

Overview

"When does a life bend towards freed? grasp its direction" asks Adrienne Rich in Dark Fields of the Republic, her major new work. Her explorations go to the heart of democracy and love, and the historical and present endangerment of both.

A theater of voices of men and women, the dead and the living, over time and across continents, the poems of Dark Fields of the Republic take conversations, imaginary and real, actions taken for better or worse, out of histories and songs to extend the poet's reach of witness and power of connection--and then invites the reader to participate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393348064
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/16/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	444 KB

About the Author

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose.

Editorial Reviews

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 Visin,'' 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.'' (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"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.

Library Journal

Cassandra, you may remember, was cursed to speak only the truth but never to be believed. Rich has much of Cassandra about her. Her poetry is based in the moral demand that each word be truth, most exactingly defined, which does not make her a comfortable poet. She does not pepper (or salt) her pages with the cosy paraphernalia of modern life: when the TV appears in her lines, it is most often blaring forth bad news of poverty or violence. She does not confide in confessional asides. She does not restrict her vision or her voice to the polite or the acceptable. She has never been more public nor, at the same time, more private than in these fin de siecle lyrics, some of the most moving of which detail her fierce awareness of mortality: "dying in full desire / thirsting for the coldest water / hungering for hottest food / gazing into the wildest light." Rich, however uncomfortable, has won virtually every honor in American poetry.

Patricia Monaghan