Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 - 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.

In poems written since 1991, Rich conceives a spare but variegated poetic landscape where the borders of politics, art and personal relationships dissolve to unloose disembodied, truth-telling voices: "...this is not somewhere else but here,/ our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,/ its own ways of making people disappear." Two sections, "What Kind of Times Are These" and "Then Or Now," explore the individual mind's impress on the world, sometimes drawing from the lives of political visionaries and intellectuals. In the 10-part poem, "Calle Vision," a real place becomes a topography of human memory and imagination. Ideas ("surely the love of life is never-ending") undulate with imagistic details ("a cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds") in poems with often shorter lines than in her last book, An Atlas of the Difficult World; forms like couplets and quatrains are also more frequently used here. Distilled to shorthand, this is political, deeply personal poetry that emerges from Rich's experience of the world's horrors and beauty, and her knowledge that "The beauty of darkness/ is how it lets you see."
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