Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998

by Adrienne Rich

Book Overview

Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it means, to stand fast; what it means to move. In these astonishing new poems, Adrienne Rich dares to look and to extend her poetic language as witness to the treasures--the midnight salvage--we rescue from fear and fragmentation. Rich's work has long challenged social plausibilities built on violence and demoralizing power. In Midnight Salvage, she continues her explorations at the end of the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393319849
• ISBN13: 9780393319842
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 86 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

vague but worth it

As much as some reviewers on here denounce Rich as elitist and too heady (when they themselves seem much nearer that criticism than does Rich), she is an amazing crafter of language. Yah, she is vague, and yah she is almost impossible to follow sometimes, but enjoy it. You play with them, throw em around in your head and figure out the meanings. Poems aren't always meant to be straightforward (though some would argue with that) and there's a pleasure in that. These are puzzles, and if you don't have the patience for puzzles then you need to reconsider buying this book.

"Rising From the Wreck"

Adrienne Rich's twenty-second book arrives in her seventieth year on the planet and the fiftieth year of a distinguished literary career. To scan the list of publications prefacing her seventeenth collection of poems is to feel small jolts of recognition - one title recalling the moment when your sense of what it meant to be a daughter, wife, mother, self, or mind abruptly veered into dangerous new territory, and another evoking a whole decade of the American century. How bracing her tenacity has been, and how courageous her changes. In 1951, at the age of twenty-two, Rich received the coveted Yale Younger Poets award for poems W. H. Auden patted on the back because they "are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, [and] respect their elders." Twelve years later her "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" shocked readers with its broken prosodies and epiphanies of women's experience in a sexist society. "Diving Into the Wreck" (1973), "The Dream of a Common Language" (1978), "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far" (1981), "Your Native Land, Your Life" (1993), and "The Dark Fields of the Republic" (1995) have established Rich as an activist writer of impressive reach and power. Despite crippling rheumatoid arthritis and looming despair at the degradations of language and the sociopolitical scene at the millennium, she's still here. Still talking.And still making waves: two years ago Rich refused the President's prestigious National Medal for the Arts because of what she called, in a speech at the University of Massachusetts, the fracturing of our social contract by "the omnivorously acquisitive few" who preside over "a dwindling middle class and a multiplying number of ill-served, throwaway citizens and workers." While many readers honor Rich's public stance against injustice, some deplore the entrance of such themes into her poetry, arguing that art must transcend the political to be universal and enduring. In Rich's case, what transcends politics is the voice at the center of her work: an ethical consciousness in the act of resolutely finding a way through terrible difficulties. Refusing to be distracted, she thinks and feels along the labyrinth, fully aware that whatever waits around the bend - barricade, abyss, torturer's knife, knowledge - can kill the spirit. The thing can't be foreseen or forestalled, either, without compromising the whole endeavor. Yet "Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it / means, to stand fast; what it means to move.""Midnight Salvage" is muted and elliptical because the experiences of individuals and the forces impinging on them have become harder to pinpoint. They're like water to a fish trying to identify the medium that presses evenly on all sides and supplies all sustenance. The home we live and breathe in is inchoately oppressive - a supersaturated marketplace where events, ideas, rights, governments, peoples, selves, health, oceans, the air, and the words that might tell them tr

I love reading this book

Adrienne Rich is one of my favorite poets ever. Everytime I read a new poem, or book by ACR, I learn something new. I take whatever she writes with the utmost seriousness because I know that she is a writer that takes her craft seriously. Rich combines the usual separate domains of poetry and philosophy. Is it "poetic philosophy" or "philosophical poetry"? I go with the latter; her work has the aesthetic beauty of a Wallace Stevens with the philosophical rigor of a writer utterly aware of her place and time. She is a true American writer, that refuses to use the "canonical" American writers only; she also uses Miles Davis, Muriel Rukesyer, John Coltrane and Julia de Burgos as her guides. This book is very good.