Later Poems: Selected and New 1971-2012

by Adrienne Rich

Overview

The final volume of poems by America’s most powerful and distinctive poetic voice.

Later Poems: Selected and New brings together a remarkable body of work by the celebrated poet. Included are Adrienne Rich’s own selections from twelve volumes of published works, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, An Atlas of the Difficult World, and her final volume, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, along with ten powerful new poems, previously uncollected. This collection testifies to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century, and will continue to inspire readers for years to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393351835
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/23/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Diving into the Wreck (1971-1972)

Trying to Talk with a Man 3

When We Dead Awaken 5

Incipience 7

The Mirror in Winch Two Are Seen As One 9

From the Prison House 12

Diving into the Wreck 14

The Phenomenology of Anger 18

For a Sister 23

For the Dead 24

Meditations for a Savage Child 25

The Dream of a Common Language (1974-1977)

Power 33

Origins and History of Consciousness 34

Hunger 37

Cartographies of Silence 40

Twenty-one Love Poems 45

Upper Broadway 57

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff 58

A Woman Dead in Her Forties 61

Toward the Solstice 67

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1978-1981)

Coast to Coast 73

Integrity 75

Transit 78

For Memory So What Is Possible 82

For Ethel Rosenberg 85

Heroines 91

Grandmothers 95

The Spirit of Place 98

Frame 105

A Vision 108

Your Native Land, Your Life (1981-1985)

Sources 113

For the Record 130

North American Time 132

Virginia 1906 137

Dreams Before Waking 140

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem 143

What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be 149

Poetry: I; II, Chicago; III 151

Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties 154

Homage to Winter 155

Blue Rock 157

Yom Kippur 1984 159

Edges 163

Contradictions: Tracking Poems 164

Time's Power (1985-1988)

Solfeggietto 183

This 186 Negotiations 187

In a Classroom 188

The Novel 189

In Memoriam: D.K. 190

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest 192

Sleepwalking Next to Death 194

Delta 199

6/21 200

Dreamwood 201

Harpers Ferry 202

Living Memory 206

An Atlas of the Difficult World (1988-1991)

An Atlas of the Difficult World 213

That Mouth 234

Marghanita 235

Tattered Kaddish 237

Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud 238

Darklight 241

For a Friend in Travail 243

Final Notations 244

Dark Fields of the Republic (1991-1995)

What Kind of Times Are These 247

What Kind of Times Are These 247

In Those Years 248

To the Days 249

Miracle Ice Cream 250

Rachel 251

Amends 252

Calle Visión 253

Reversion 260

Then or Now 262

Food Packages: 1947 262

Innocence: 1945 263

Sunset, December, 1993 264

Deportations 265

And Now 266

Six Narratives 267

1 You drew up the story of your life I was in that story 267

2 You drew up a story about me I fled that story 268

3 You were telling a story about women to young men 269

4 You were telling a story about love 270

5 I was telling you a story about love 271

6 You were telling a story about war it is our story 272

Inscriptions 273

1 Comrade 273

2 Movement 275

3 Origins 277

4 History 278

5 Voices 280

6 Edgelit 284

Midnight Salvage (1995-1998)

The Art of Translation 291

Midnight Salvage 293

Char 299

Modotti 302

Shattered Head 304

Letters to a Young Poet 306

Carnino Real 310

Seven Skins 313

Rusted Legacy 317

A Long Conversation 319

Fox (1998-2000)

Victory 333

For This 336

Regardless 338

Architect 340

Fox 342

Messages 343

Fire 344

Grating 346

Noctilucent Clouds 349

If Your Name Is on the List 351

Terza Rima 352

Four Short Poems 361

Rauschenberg's Bed 363

Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot 364

Ends of the Earth 366

The School Among the Ruins (2000-2004)

Centaur's Requiem 369

Equinox 370

Tell Me 372

The School Among the Ruins 374

This Evening Let's 378

There Is No One Story and One Story Only 381

Usonian Journals 2000 382

Transparencies 389

Ritual Acts 391

Alternating Current 394

Dislocations: Seven Scenarios 397

Wait 402

Screen Door 403

Tendril 404

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2004-2006)

Voyage to the Denouement 411

Calibrations 412

Wallpaper 414

In Plain Sight 417

Behind the Motel 420

Archaic 421

Long After Stevens 423

Rhyme 424

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho 426

This Is Not the Room 428

Unknown Quantity 429

Tactile Value 430

Director's Notes 432

Rereading The Dead Lecturer 433

Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send 435

The University Reopens as the Floods Recede 441

Draft #2006 443

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth 448

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2001-2010)

Waiting for Rain, for Music 453

Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time 455

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve 457

Scenes of Negotiation 458

From Sickbed Shores 461

Axel Avakar 464

Ballade of the Poverties 472

Emergency Clinic 474

Confrontations 476

Circum/Stances 477

Winterface 480

Quarto 482

Black Locket 484

Generosity 485

Powers of Recuperation 486

New and Unpublished Poems (2010-2012)

Itinerary 493

For the Young Anarchists 495

Fragments of an Opera 496

Liberté 500

Teethsucking Bird 501

Undesigned 502

Suspended Lines 504

Tracings 505

From Strata 507

Endpapers 511

Notes on the Poems 513

Acknowledgments 525

Index of Titles and First Lines 527

Editorial Reviews

"She dreamed, famously, of a common language, and that is what she has left us with: language that made what was true, truer; what was small, bigger; what was silent, heard; what was fleeting, eternal."

New York Times Magazine

"“[Rich’s poems] shine with defiance, fierce commitment, introspection and self-reproach, ‘hunger for clarity’ and ‘sour plum jam,’ majestic coastlines and domestic detail. Here is a poet who knew her own contradictions, determined to depict them accurately, and equally determined that she would not write for herself alone."

San Francisco Chronicle - Stephen Burt

This big and important selection begins at the point where Rich (who died in March 2012) became a national political figure: Diving into the Wreck (1973), with its often-quoted title poem, became a must-read for 1970s feminists, while The Dream of a Common Language (1977), with its central sequence “Twenty-One Love Poems,” set a new standard for writing on love between women. The long phrases of “Yom Kippur 1984” look back at her Jewish heritage, showing how a writer’s solitude interacts with an activist’s solidarity; An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) found phrases harsh and mild for American landscapes, especially her adoptive home in California, where the “light of outrage is the light of history,/ springing upon us when we’re least prepared.” Rich could depict calls to action and prophetic near-despair, but her white spaces and broken-up lines, recurring symbols (solitary mammals, lost boats, telescopes) and isolated terms could also portray an inner life as complex as it was committed. Those portrayals resound anew through the 10 new poems, among them an inspiring address “For the Young Anarchists” and the last of her many responses to Wallace Stevens. “What’s concrete for me: from there I cast out further,” she wrote; this inspiring retrospective shows just how much she could take in. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly