Fox: Poems, 1998-2000

by Adrienne Rich

Overview

"A challenging collection that should more than satisfy [Rich's] large and loyal following."—Washington Post Book World

In this volume, Adrienne Rich pursues her signature themes and takes them further: the discourse between poetry and history, interlocutions within and across gender, dialogues between poets and visual artists, human damages and dignity, and the persistence of utopian visions. Here Rich continues taking the temperature of mind and body in her time in an intimate and yet commanding voice that resonates long after an initial reading. Fox is formidable and moving, fierce and passionate, and one of Rich's most powerful works to date. "Justly celebrated....Rich has long wanted to set her readers' minds blazing...she succeeds."—Publishers Weekly starred review "Intimate, explorative, these are poems with a millennial feel, at once retrospective and forward-looking."—Washington Post Book World

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393070781
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/17/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	778 KB

About the Author

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose.

Table of Contents

	Victory	3
	Veterans Day	9
	For This	16
	Regardless	18
	Signatures	20
	Nora's Gaze	21
	Architect	23
	Fox	25
	Messages	26
	Fire	27
	Twilight	29
	Octobrish	31
	Second Sight	32
	Grating	34
	Noctilucent Clouds	37
	If Your Name Is on the List	39
	1999	40
	Terza Rima	41
	Four Short Poems	54
	Rauschenberg's Bed	58
	Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot	59
	Ends of the Earth	61
	Notes	63

Editorial Reviews

Intimate,explorative,these are poems with a millennial feel,at once retrospective and forward-looking.

Washington Post Book World

Often unfairly criticized for the polemical tinge of her work, Rich has been the sexual and social conscience of the poetry world for nearly fifty years. She is responsible for some of the few successful political poems of the '60s, and recent poems have expressed her continuous slow burn over a host of social ills that stubbornly refuse to be solved. Although she has expressed disappointment with the limits of language, her poems, which can be elliptical and abstruse, escape the pitfalls of the usual games. In the title poem, the speaker cries out against sexual frustration and loneliness: "Badly I needed/ a vixen for the long time none had come near me. // I needed recognition from a triangulated face." Whatever your personal perspectives, these images refer to universal human needs, to the helplessness we feel expressing love and pleading for a response. In many of these rewarding poems, the answers are as close by as a dear friend. Rich's explorations of intimacy and community continue to be among her greatest strengths.
—Stephen Whited

The justly celebrated Rich (Diving into the Wreck, The Fact of a Doorframe, etc.) has been publishing verse now for over 50 years; her oeuvre has included 1950s formalism, some of the subtlest protest verse of the 1960s and broadly successful volumes in verse and prose that helped set the agenda for 1970s feminism and gay and lesbian liberation. Rich's recent style developed slowly throughout the 1990s comes to full fruition here, conveying her familiar attentions to social injustice and intense introspection with and a sometimes harsh, fragmented, versatile line whose sources include George Oppen and Anglo-Saxon accentual verse. Rich praises, commemorates and questions friends and public figures, while thinking about what political action means; lines and stanzas glide over West Coast landscape, revive or revise history, and interrogate the poet's frustration with a profligate, unjust society. "On the bare slope where we were driven," Rich insists in "Messages," "The most personal feelings became historical." One of several powerful poems for, to and about unnamed friends or mentors offers "A lighthouse keeper's ethics:/ you tend for all or none/ for this you might set your furniture on fire." With her emotional complexity, her scratched-up sonic surfaces and her strong ethical commitments, Rich has long wanted to set her readers' minds blazing: more often than not, in her new work, she succeeds. (Oct.) Forecast: Rich continues to combine a large popular following with large-scale academic attention and high-brow acclaim, on a scale almost no other poet can manage. Stronger in itself than her 1998 Midnight Salvage, this volume should get more help from Rich's recent collection of essaysand interviews, Arts of the Possible. Rich's first book, A Change of World, made her the Yale Younger Poet for 1951; that book's 50th anniversary may further boost media coverage. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

One of a handful of major American poets whose every new work is a cause for excitement, Rich is as stunning in her use of skewed, penetrating language as she is implacable in her politics of liberation. Art and conviction have always mixed well in her work a real accomplishment and they continue to do so here. But her arguments are perhaps less edgy, her tone a little more malleable than in previous collections. As she declares in "Regardless," a poem about loving a man, "we'd love/ regardless of manifestoes I wrote or signed." Still, this is vigorous, engaged poetry, as exemplified by "Victory," which compares the ailing Tory Dent to "the Nike of Samothrace/ on a staircase wings in blazing/ backdraft," and the spare "Veteran's Day," which mourns humankind's violent history while observing "how the beneficiary/ of atrocities yearns toward innocence." And then there's the title poem, a telescoped look at the female identity that is at once witty and searing. Neither a departure nor a radical advancement, this is instead another lovely augmentation adding immeasurably to Rich's panoply of works. Highly recommended. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal