The themes of this book are the poetics of violence and the poetics of love. Its impulse is the deepening of recognitions through language, in a time of ignorance and mutilation. Miss Rich has written: "For a poet...there is this primary labor with words. But I have the notion that how you live your life has something to do with it—that morality, for a poet, is a refusal of blinders, of traditional consolations, a courage to be alone, or wounded....A willingness to step out into the fog, to take paths which may lead nowhere. Certainty, predictability, are the first supports that have to go. I see the poetry of things as standing in resistance to brute mechanistic force, the charge of the rhinoceros with its head down. To discover—literally—this poetry and re-create it in language is a poet's essential action."
| ISBN: | 9780393041910 |
| Publication date: | 1st April 1969 |
| Author: | Adrienne Rich |
| Publisher: | WW Norton & Co |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 72 pages |
| Genres: |
Poetry by individual poets |