Poems Selected And New 1950 1974

Gathering reviews and essays which examine Rich's poetry and prose, this text also looks at how critical opinion about her works has changed.

“Certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through sorrow and confusion” —Cheryl Strayed, Wild “The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman’s heart and mind in language for everybody—language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to. . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this.”—Boston Evening Globe

The collected works of Adrienne Rich, whose poetry is "distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity" (New York Times). A Finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. She brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both self and society. This collected volume traces the evolution of her poetry, from her earliest work, which was formally exact and decorous, to her later work, which became increasingly radical in both its free-verse form and feminist and political content. The entire body of her poetry is on display in this vast volume, including the National Book Award–winning Diving Into the Wreck and her prize-winning Atlas of the Difficult World. The Collected Poems of Adrienne Rich gathers and memorializes all of her boldly political, formally ambitious, thoughtful, and lucid work, the whole of which makes her one of the most prolific and influential poets of our time.

More than 200 poems collected from Adrienne Rich's first six books, plus a dozen others of those decades. From their first publication, when Rich was twenty-one, in the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series, the successive volumes of her poetry have both charted the growth of her own mind and vision and mirrored our tempestuous, unsettled age. Her unmistakable voice, speaking even from the earliest poems with rare assurance and precision, wrestles with urgent questions while never failing to explore new poetic territory. In Collected Early Poems, readers will once again bear witness to Rich's triumphant assertion of the centrality of poetry in our intertwined personal and political lives.

Complete poems are bulky and too heavy to carry around. Collected poems pretend to be complete, but usually are not. Selected poems are altogether unpretentious and reader-friendly. But they can be problematic. Who decides what poems are important for inclusion in a volume of selected poems? When the selection occurs during the author’s lifetime, may one assume that the author was involved? What motivates the choice of one poem over another? How do readers’ preferences influence this choice? How do new readers and familiar readers of a poet negotiate the poems that are left out of the selection? The essays in this volume address these questions in a variety of ways, and also provide an overview of poetic writing from modernist poets to the present day, using selections from the 1940s until now. They offer new insight into the uses, both pedagogical and critical, of selection. Because Selected Poems usually address a large general public, these essays have also been written for all those who wish to know more about how these slimmer, more attractive volumes are produced.

A reissue of the classic Adrienne Rich selection, revised and expanded to cover the entirety of her career, with a new Introduction. The Fact of a Doorframe is the ideal introduction to Rich's opus, from her formative lyricism in A Change of Word (1951), to the groundbreaking poems of Diving into the Wreck (1973), to the searching voice of Fox (2001).