Time's Power is a new book by a major American poet, and a landmark in a distinguished ongoing career.
For thirty years, Rich's poetry has revealed the individual personal life―sexualities, loves, damages, struggles―as inseparable from a wider social condition, a world with others, in which the empowering of the disempowered is increasingly the source of human hope. Now her mature vision engages with the power of time itself: memory and its contradictions, the ebb and flow between parents and children, the deaths we all face sooner or later, the meaning of human responsibility in all this.
"Letters in the Family," for example, is written in the voices of three women―from the Spanish Civil War, from a Jewish rescue mission behind Nazi lines, and from present-day Southern Africa. Time's Powershows Rich writing with unprecedented range, complexity, and authority.
From Publishers Weekly
In her 14th collection, Rich, National Book Award winner ( Diving into the Wreck ), stokes the political passion for which she is well known. But she writes here with a quicker rhythm; the clipped, almost abridged quality of her lines suggests a desire to cut away excess, to distill what is essential: "we're serious now/about death . . . we're learning to be true/with her
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