![]() ![]() In my first-ever remembered dream, when I was 5 years old, I dreamed of being chased by an evil witch, running, desperately hiding to avoid her wrath around the turrets of her scary castle. ![]() At her best, she achieves what she aspires to: ""a whole new poetry beginning here. It indicates the ability to send an email. To communicate without competitiveness is the dream of her title. ""No one ever told us we had to study our lives,/ make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history/ or music."" the 70-year-old pianist said, when I asked her/ What makes a virtuoso?-Competitiveness."" Competitiveness, that masculine folly, Rich wishes to reject. The new book is divided into three sections: ""Power,"" ""Twenty-One Love Poems,"" and an untitled third part which contains some of her best writing. The world goes on the same, but Adrienne Rich is developing strongly. Her concerns have been expressed and published, but one, not explicitly stated, has been how to justify her self-absorption in a world full of fire-bombs and famine. She has had other interests and a full life: marriage, three sons, civic and political work, and a deepening commitment to the woman's movement, culminating in the book Of Woman Born also, to judge from the book before us, a searing lesbian love affair. ""This is the oppressor's language/ yet I need it to talk to you,"" she wrote in The Will to Change, 1971. In the eight books of poetry Adrienne Rich has published since 1951, language has been one of her central concerns, so that her latest title sounds right. ![]()
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