The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 - Softcover

Rich, Adrienne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393327558 ISBN 13: 9780393327557

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006

Synopsis

"Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right."--Booklist, starred review

In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ("Not of course here") learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches / blood on the undersole thickening to glass." "Usonian Journals 2000" intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/utopic vision. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.

About this title

About the Author:

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed, and widely taught, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose. Her constellation of honors includes two National Book Awards, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Ms. Rich’s volumes of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. Her prose includes the essay collections On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and the nonfiction book Of Woman Born, which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. In 2010, she was honored with The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right in a collection of vigorous lyric poems about the first four years of the twenty-first century, a period of terror, war, corporate imperialism, outrageous lies, and miasmal inarticulateness. A moment in history, Rich avers, in arresting imagery and flinty syntax, in which language has been processed into banality just like so much of the American landscape. Forthright, precise, witty, and keenly attuned to complacency, reluctance, and fear, Rich fights back with exhilaratingly choreographed poems about inane, high-pitched public cell-phone conversations, television's numbing soundtrack, the crude oversimplification and commercialization of public discourse, and the "viral / spread of social impotence producing social silence." Rich also writes piercingly, and inevitably, of war, most poignantly in the powerful title poem, in which a courageous teacher in a besieged city tells his students, "Don't let your faces turn to stone / Don't stop asking me why." Similarly, Rich tells readers not to give up hope and not to remain silent, because truth flows unabated behind the facade of spin and babble, and it will prevail. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0393327558
• ISBN 13: 9780393327557
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 116