Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006

by Adrienne Rich

Overview

“Rich’s lyrics are powerful and mournful, drenched in memory.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393334784
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/04/2009
Pages:	110
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.56(h) x 0.32(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.

Editorial Reviews

Here are blues refrains, improvisations, and the sound of birdsong. Mixed in with poems about prison life, about torture, about Wallace Stevens, it forms a potent volume.

Sunday Star Ledger

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.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

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

Library Journal