IT's unusual to review a book for which you have also written the preface. But this is a special case. Adrienne Rich's Selected Poems, published in a handsome paperback by Salmon Press, is an event in Irish poetry. It is also an event in Irish publishing: it makes available, in a comprehensive selection, the poetry of a defining contemporary poet. Therefore my review and my preface have a common source: my own wish to draw readers' attention to this crucial body of work. And perhaps one of the best ways of doing that is by setting a context for it.
Adrienne Rich began publishing poetry right in the middle of the pivotal decade for American poetry: the 1950s. In fact, when the century ends, and the inventory is taken, the Fifties will almost certainly prove to be the turning point for poetry in the English language everywhere. The household gods of Modernism were beginning to fall; Eliot's writ no longer ran; the spacious kingdom of 19th century romanticism and canon making was beginning to fracture into smaller, dissident fiefdoms. The stuffy, scratchy feel of a curtained room was just about to end.
It was a time of change, of fascinating discord. This was the decade in which Philip Larkin published "The Less Deceived" Robert Lowell "Life Studies", Elizabeth Bishop "North and South", John Ashbery "Some Trees", Thomas Kinsella "Another September", Robert Creeley "Le Fou", and Marianne Moore her Collected Poems. In the States it began as the decade of Wilbur and ended as the age of Berryman. The echo chambers were gone. No one sounded like anyone else.
Yet another book published at the start of the decade was "A Change of World", by Adrienne Rich. It began life in a thoroughly auspicious way, chosen for publication by W.H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets award, an important rite of passage for young American poets. Adrienne Rich was then twenty two, and just finishing her education at Radcliffe. A few years on and Syliva Plath would meet her in the rain one wintry night in Boston and leave an impression of her as having "short black hair, great sparking black eyes and a tulip red umbrella". But for now she and her poems certainly gave Auden the impression that they would be a trouble free combination. In his preface he wrote confidently: "The poems a reader will encounter in this book are nearly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them and do not tell fibs".
Not many of the poems from "A Change of World" are in this volume. The few that are, such as "Storm Warnings", do little to convey the bright, confined tone of that first book. Certainly nothing in them conveys exactly the turmoil, self questioning and dissidence which this particular poet has recorded as the decade loomed around her with its iconic poetry and unshaken orthodoxies. Eventually she would contest those orthodoxies in superb poems and eloquent prose. Later she would canvass, in some of the poems here from the later collections - particularly "Diving into the Wreck" and "North American Time" - a new poetic stance. Later again, in an essay called "Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location of the Poet", she would speak of her own struggle to reconcile her womanhood, her imagination and her sense of poetic history with the place where she began: "Every group," she writes there, "that lives under the naming and image making power of a dominant culture is at risk from this mental fragmentation and needs an art to resist it.
Is this then an art of resistance? Only partly. This book contains poems from fourteen volumes of poetry. They follow the young and metrical artist from the first accomplished poems through painful fractures of language and breakings open of the poem; they pursue the Cambridge wife and mother to lesbian radicalism and the wonderful "Twenty one Love Poems", which eloquently align sexual choice with visionary political dissent.
But an art of resistance can be narrow and this is not a narrow book. In fact, the span of these poems shows Adrienne Rich striking up a surprising conversation with the tradition of poetry itself, they are full of hidden histories and musical arguments: with Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens and Edwin Arlington Robinson. A poem like "Diving into the Wreck", reprinted in this volume is nearer than might at first seem to the Yeats of "Sailing to Byzantium". And the big lines and lyrical attack of "Dedications" from a late book called "An Atlas of the Difficult World", return confidently to Whitman's America to the shouting distance, of that music, to the communal insistence of that project:
I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense, yellow lamp spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
Finally, the poems here have made their way back to the centre of poetry. But a very different centre: a far more fractious, contested and exciting place which these poems helped to make. For poets like myself, it is a centre made safer by the dissidence in this work. By her insistence on the ethical vision as integral to the poetic imagination, rather than an optional addition to it, Adrienne Rich will be seen as one of the shape makers of the century's poets.
In the end, however, I recommend this book not for its history, but for its glowing and generous present moment. No student or reader of contemporary poetry will want to be without these poems, and without Jessie Lendennie and Salmon books they might have been, at least in Ireland. I was unable to find a misprint, from start to finish. And at the end of the book there is a real addition in the poignant and eloquent afterword by Jean Valentine, which brings the American and Irish connections full circle.