Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 - Hardcover

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.

Rich's poetry is always concerned with the struggle to make meaningful connections with other human beings. Here, Rich looks back on an unhealed mother-daughter conflict, a broken friendship, and other past wounds and events from an age when "We're serious now/ about death we talk to her daily as to a neighbor." Though some of the poems are minor, and the style of others episodic and indirect, only one--"A Story"--is obscure and unsatisfying. Overall, the collection is serious, thoughtful, and deeply sensitive, especially to the experience of women. These are poems of introspection and remembrance as well as historical significance; they move from the narrative "Harper's Ferry" to pieces that give us the voices of women fighting in Spain's civil war or against apartheid in South Africa. Recommended.
- Bettina Drew, City Coll., CUNY
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