Лучшие книги Адриенна Рич

"I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail." These provocative poems move with the power of Rich's distinctive voice.

Adrienne Rich was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major intellectual voice of her generation. Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of her most renowned essays into one volume, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice, her prophetic vision, and her revolutionary views on social justice. Rich’s essays unite the political, personal, and poetical like no other.


Essential Essays is edited and includes an introduction by leading feminist scholar, literary critic, and poet Sandra M. Gilbert. Emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement, the essays selected here range from the 1960s to 2008. The volume contains one of Rich’s earliest essays,“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” which discusses the need for female self-definition, along with excerpts from her ambitious, ground-breaking Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. As the New York Times wrote, Rich “brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse,” as evidenced in her 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”


Also among these insightful and forward-thinking works are: “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity”; excerpts from What Is Found There, about the need to reexamine the literary canon; “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts”; “Poetry and the Forgotten Future”; and other writings that profoundly shaped second-wave feminism, each balanced by Rich’s signature blend of research, theory, and self-reflection.

The final volume of poems assembled by America’s most powerful and distinctive poetic voice.


In Later Poems: Selected and New 1971–2012, the strong trajectory of the work of one of the most important artists of American letters is on display. This volume brings together a remarkable body of work. Included are Adrienne Rich’s own selections from twelve volumes of published works, including the National Book Award–winning Diving Into the Wreck, An Atlas of the Difficult World, and her most recent volume, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, along with ten powerful new poems, previously uncollected. Among these, “From Strata” is a kind of archaeology of the present day; “Itinerary” searches for an “indefinite future” in a menaced landscape; “For the Young Anarchists” offers a trope of skilled labor for political action; and the haunting voice of “Teethsucking Bird” reminds us of what we have been told to forget. This collection testifies to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers for years to come.

In the intimate address of "Axel Avákar," the black humor of "Quarto," and the underground journey of "Powers of Recuperation," compressed lyrics flash among larger scenarios where images, dialogues, blues, and song spiral into political visions. Adrienne Rich has said, "I believe almost everything I know, have come to understand, is somewhere in this book."

from "Ballade of the Poverties"

There's the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you

Can't get to the poverty of bodies lying unburied

There's the poverty of labor offered silently on the curb

The poverty of yard sale scrapings spread

And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street

Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words

There are poverties and there are poverties.

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth – Poems 2004– 2006

One of America’s most distinguished poets explores the complex relationship between art and social justice.

Over more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ worlds.

This powerful new collection includes a stirring response to the anthology Iraqi Poetry Today, a critique of three classic socialist manifestos, and a rereading of The Dead Lecturer, an early volume of poems by LeRoi Jones. Rich engages the impulse to make art that both impels toward and interacts with social change, a theme she also traces through the letters of poets Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, gay and lesbian politics and poetry, and influential texts on Zionism and the Jewish diaspora.

In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ("Not of course here") learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches / blood on the undersole thickening to glass." "Usonian Journals 2000" intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/utopic vision. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.

These essays trace a distinguished writer's engagement with her time, her arguments with herself and others. "I am a poet who knows the social power of poetry, a United States citizen who knows herself irrevocably tangled in her society's hopes, arrogance, and despair," Adrienne Rich writes. The essays in Arts of the Possible search for possibilities beyond a compromised, degraded system, seeking to imagine something else. They call on the fluidity of the imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound, that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally suture and not tear apart. This volume collects Rich's essays from the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons for declining the National Medal for the Arts.

Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood.

The experience is her own - as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother - but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

A new book of poems by one of America's most distinguished poets.

"When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?" asks Adrienne Rich in Dark Fields of the Republic, her major new work. Her explorations go to the heart of democracy and love, and the historical and present endangerment of both.

The poems of Dark Fields of the Republic are a theater of voices: of men and women, the dead and the living, over time and across continents. Rich writes out of conversations actual and imaginary, actions taken for better or for worse, out of histories and songs, humdrum and terrible events, out of the most intimate loves and love for the world. Through these poems, she extends the poet's reach of witness and power of connection, and invites the reader-listener to participate.

Through journals, letters, dreams, and close readings of the work of many poets, Adrienne Rich reflects on how poetry and politics enter and impinge on American life. This expanded edition includes a new preface by the author as well as her post-9/11 "Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture."

"Rich's poems do not demand the willing suspension of disbelief. They demand belief, and it is a measure of her success as a poet that most of the time they get it. . . . The affirmation and the occasional moments of pure joy in these poems are quiet but fully earned."--Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review

National Book Award finalist Adrienne Rich (An Atlas of the Difficult World) is unequaled among living poets for her success in reclaiming serious poetry from scholars and returning it to the lives of general readers. Collected here for the first time are more than 200 poems: all those in her first six books plus a dozen others.

The heart of Adrienne Rich's award-winning collection beats in its title sequence, 13 poems charting "An Atlas of the Difficult World." Like Atlas, who bears Earth on his shoulders, Rich bears--and wields--an enormous political consciousness. These poems find her struggling to say what is honest and true, resisting easy answers, having the ambition to risk everything; these are the energies for which her readers return. For example, after deriding as solipsistic the poetry of Richard Hugo, she writes:
I wonder if this is a white man's madness.
I honor your truth and refuse to leave it at that.
What have I learned from stories of the hunt, of lonely men in gangs?
But there were other stories...
Rich knows that mere political poetry has a quick expiration date. Her genius enables her to speak to the moment and to posterity simultaneously. "Catch if you can your country's moment, begin / where any calendar's ripped-off: Appomattox / Wounded Knee, Los Alamos / Selma, the last airlift from Saigon," she exhorts at one point, tuning the present to its history like Muriel Rukeyser or Ezra Pound. Early in the book Rich praises "those needed to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments ... the meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate woman, the desperate man / --never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair," but wonders who will continue this work in the America she has witnessed.