For someone like myself, who writes in a language she was not born into, the second language assumes and retains a special fascination. We absorb our first language long before we speak it, and we learn to speak it fluently without ever becoming conscious of the learning process. The second language – in my case…
First it was only the winter trees— their boughs eloquent at midnight with small but mortal explosions, and always a humming under the lashings of storm. Nights I sat at the kitchen door listening out into the darkness until finally spring came, and everything transcended. As one by one the ponds opened, took the white…
It is before an undeclared war. She is full of feeling, yet abstracted; she must tend to details: see that the church is ready, the rings present, her sister’s dress, a pale green, is the right shade of dress that will not war with her mother’s. A floating homunculus is present in her body, but…
Consciousness and Community in Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 Adrienne Rich has explored the relationship of personal and political consciousness in her poetry for the past 25 years. She has achieved a new synthesis of private and public experience in her most recent work, The Dream of a Common Language:…
When the black snake flashed onto the morning road, and the truck could not swerve— death, that is how it happens. Now he lies looped and useless as an old bicycle tire. I stop the car and carry him into the bushes. He is as cool and gleaming as a braided whip, he is as…
A man with shovels in his hands is waiting. I think he is holding them out for us to take, to move coal into the bin near the old furnace. He stands taller than my father and it was never him who shovelled the huge lumps of brilliant anthracite, but her and me; working silently,…
In a world full of mangoes, hurricanes, armchairs and muskrats, how does a poet choose just two things for an original and truthful comparison? How does he select two things that are similar but not too similar? Good metaphors must surprise us by their unexpected combinations but they must still hang together; A must, in…
I’m going to give up my little tufts of grief clustered like weeds that edge the highway. I meant to drive until a town fanned light through the spired stalks. It may never happen. When you asked me to remember the first things, I told you a yellow house, the field behind it and the…
for Darren A grooved disc, a sliver of diamond, and the music rises; His darkened eyes, the ribbon of birth Cut: and the influential squawl Thrilling the air —within which breath is drawn, Within which the race is to the quickest, Within which the race stories itself— rises;…
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