About this Book

Adrienne Rich is a major American poet whose work compels the attention of an ever-growing number of readers. Her most recent book, Diving into the Wreck, was co-winner of the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry. For this new book, she has selected poems that span almost a quarter of a century--twenty-four years of radical inner growth in the poet. She has made herself important to her readers because she shares with them her commitment to that growth. The present selection draws from all seven of the poet's earlier books; it also includes eight poems not published in earlier volumes and thirteen poems written since Diving into the Wreck. Readers familiar with Rich's career will find here poems long unavailable; others, who have come more recently to her work, will discover how deeply, how far back into the past her themes go. Most significantly, the book is not, as she says, "summing-up or even a retrospective"; it is "the graph of a process still going on"--