Leaflets: Poems 1965-1968

Leaflets is Adrienne Rich's fifth book of poems. It contains twenty-eight new poems, five adaptations of Dutch, Yiddish, and Russian poets, and a sequence of seventeen poems loosely based on the ghazal, a common form in Middle Eastern poetic tradition; these ghazals comprise a kind of notebook of a month in the summer of 1968. The themes of this book are the poetics of violence and the poetics of love. Its impulse is the deepening of recognitions through language, in a time of ignorance and...