Midnight Salvage

by Rich, Adrienne Cecile

• ISBN13: 9780393046823
• ISBN10: 0393046826
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-02-01
• Publisher: W W NORTON

Summary

"Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it means, to stand fast; what it means to move." In these astonishing new poems, Adrienne Rich dares to look and to extend her poetic language as witness to the treasures-the midnight salvage-we rescue from fear and violence. Adrienne Rich's work has long challenged social plausibilities built on violence and demoralizing power. In Midnight Salvage she continues her explorations at the end of the century, trying, as she has said, "to face the terrible with hope, in language as complex as necessary, as communicative as possible-a poetics which can work as antidote to complacency, self-involvement, and despair. I have wanted to assume a theater of voices rather than the restricted I. To write both for readers I know exist and those I can only imagine, finding their own salvaged beauty as I have found mine." These are risky poems, infused with the cruelty of history, the presence of the body, the beauty of the natural world, with human love and longing. In the course of these poems, Rich invokes the poet and Resistance fighter RenAs Char and the photographer and revolutionary Tina Modotti and conjures Julia de Burgos, Hart Crane, and Miles Davis in an urban underworld. Midnight Salvage is a major new work by one of the essential voices of our time.

Table of Contents

THE ART OF TRANSLATION	3	(4)
FOR AN ANNIVERSARY	7	(1)
MIDNIGHT SALVAGE	8	(8)
CHAR	16	(3)
MODOTTI	19	(2)
SHATTERED HEAD	21	(2)
1941	23	(2)
LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET	25	(5)
CAMINO REAL	30	(4)
PLAZA STREET AND FLATBUSH	34	(4)
SEVEN SKINS	38	(5)
"THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES"	43	(8)
RUSTED LEGACY	51	(2)
A LONG CONVERSATION	53	(18)
NOTES ON THE POEMS	71	(4)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	75