Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.latimes.misc From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: TIMES BOOK PRIZES 1992 On 'An Atlas of the Difficult World' Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 07:02:32 EST Message-ID: HEADLINE: TIMES BOOK PRIZES 1992 On 'An Atlas of the Difficult World' Publication Date: Sunday November 8, 1992 BYLINE: Alicia Ostriker "The dream of a common language." "A whole new poetry beginning here." "Her nerves / the nerves of a midwife learning her trade." "I am thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need." These are a few phrases in Adrienne Rich's poetry from which I and other readers have drawn sustenance and courage. Now I find myself repeating this line: "A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country." An atlas is a book of maps, and Atlas is the name of the mythic Titan who carries the world on his shoulders. Both senses apply to Adrienne Rich. For 40 years she has charted America's mental and emotional landscapes, in poetry and essays distinguished by tough intelligence, urgent feeling, vaultingly vivid imagery, a language as tensile as the rigging of ships. She has also been a voice of conscience and conscientiousness: I have to cast my lot with those Who age after age, perversely, With no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. In the path-breaking essay "When We Dead Awaken," she described the formalism and restraint of her early writing as "asbestos gloves," and went on to say that "In the late fifties, I was able to write, for the first time, directly about experiencing myself as a woman--until then I had tried very hard not to identify myself as a female poet." A generation of women poets knew precisely what that meant. The knowledge has revolutionized American poetry, and Rich has broken new ground with each new book. What does it mean, she is constantly asking--what can it mean to be a woman, a thinking woman, a feminist, a political activist; to be a lesbian, a Jew, a North American, a white person, an inhabitant of a poisoned planet? What does it mean to be a dreamer, a poet? What can we do with our rage, our despair, our love--those "necessities of life"? How are all these realities connected? What are the costs of the lives we choose, what are the risks, the possibilities? What histories lie behind us, what difference can we make to the future? Always rooted in land and history, her center of gravity has moved from New England to the West Coast. The title poem of "An Atlas of the Difficult World" includes some signature landscape poetry: Within two miles of the Pacific rounding this long bay, sheening the light for miles inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over strawberry and artichoke fields , --this is where I live now. But it's the paysage moralise she always finds: "the desert where missiles are planted like corn. . . the breadbasket of foreclosed farms . . . the suburbs of acquiescence." Structurally the poem is a 13-part sequence of haunted, fragmentary meditations and memories. One section evokes migrant workers poisoned by Malathion, another recreates letters from Soledad Prison, yet another addresses the Gulf War. For those of us (I count myself) thrown into despair by our country's deeds, by flags blossoming on our neighbors' lawns, Rich broods: A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country (gazing through the great circle of Window Rock into the sheen of the Viet Nam Wall) as he wrestles for his own being. A patriot is a citizen trying to wake from the burnt-out dream of inno cence, the nightmare of the white general and the Black general posed in their camouflage. Part of what divides Rich's work from the poetry of propaganda with which it is sometimes confused is her insistence on a personal wrestling; she can never ultimately stand in righteously complacent judgment of others. When she writes that "every flag that flies today is a cry of pain," I am forced to recall not only that Americans are confident killers but also that the killers are themselves in pain--isn't that what the "camouflage" of high-tech control always conceals? Next to its title poem, the most complex sequence is "Eastern War Time," which sets the protected young girl Adrienne Rich was in 1943 against other young girls--one doomed to die on Mengele's operating table in Auschwitz, one walking into the woods to become a partisan--and then against "a woman of sixty" whose memories of the civil-rights struggle have "entered her connective tissue." Memory speaks this poem's concluding section, warning "Want to do right? don't count on me," offering a litany of images of Jewishness, none saving, none final. Other poems evoke the lives of friends and acquaintances under the signs of loss, death, suicide and endurance; several evoke the poet's own encroaching mortality. Somber, resolute, this voice speaks for anyone: it will be short, it will take all your breath it will not be simple, it will become your will. There are also, in this book, love poems and poems of praise--"to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel." In "An Atlas of the Difficult World," Rich once again reminds us of how achingly significant poetry can be--should be--in a culture torn, as perhaps all cultures are, "between bitterness and hope." POETRY AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT W Poems 1988-1991, by Adrienne Rich (W.W. Norton) FINALISTS THE WILD IRIS, by Louise Gluck (Ecco Press) THE FATHER, by Sharon Olds (Alfred A. Knopf) SUB ROSA, by Susan Prospere (W.W. Norton) BREAD WITHOUT SUGAR, by Gerald Stern (W.W. Norton) This article is copyright 1992 The Los Angeles Times Home Edition. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM