"Diving Into the Wreck" … was fueled by an immense pounding energy, a raw power, "raw" in the sense of "wound." It was played on a kettle drum with an ax, to a warehouse filled with riot casualties. By contrast, "The Dream of a Common Language" is played on the piano, at evening, beside a half-open window. There are one or two other people in the room, friends of the player, and perhaps some strangers listening outside. The music is subdued but intense, and it is only after you have been hearing it for some time that you realize the player is half-blind and is missing several fingers. These are poems written despite, poems of willed recuperation. Pain is no longer their theme but a given condition they are trying to transcend; the best word for what they have is perhaps not "power" but "authority."

This book will probably be labeled "feminist" and even "lesbian." Both labels apply, though like all labels they are too often used merely for slotting items into pigeonholes so they can be safely dismissed. Adrienne Rich, however, is not easy to dismiss, and her poems, even when they insist on such labels, escape from them. "Twenty-one Love Poems," for instance, seems at first to be a cycle of poems tracing an affair between two women, yet it eludes such simple definition. For although the sequence is insistently rooted in the mundane details of such an affair, conducted amidst the specifics of a city—"the Discount Wares, the shoe-store," "the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties / of our own neighbourhoods"—it begins to open both outward and inward, until by its end the dialogue with the lover has become a frightening monologue, the speaker's conversation with her "own soul." The figure in the final poem is not a "lesbian" or a "feminist" or anything with such familiar features. It's pure Rich, a portentous presence, half dark, half light, moving imponderably in moonlight across a space formed by a great circle of stones. (p. 7)

These poems are by an older poet, and possibilities, especially possibilities for heroism, have contracted in the face of the actual. Miss Rich is now asking: How, given the world and its history—which in her eyes must be seen as a history of oppression for all women and many men—how, given violent and shoddy America, can anyone live and affirm? (pp. 7, 42)

The real interest is in women and their histories, both personal and mythical. In this universe, helicopters have no place; instead there are images of caves, moonlight, subversive witchcrafts practiced in "the kingdom of the sons," curing, growing. The voice of these poems no longer says, "I could be as good as a man," but "Men are not good enough"; or, more clearly, "I want to be a woman, as fully as possible." History has not feared women becoming men, but women becoming women; thus all women are still "unfinished," "halfborn," their lives throughout history stunted and denied. Again and again, the figure of the scavenger recurs, as a "slippered crone" going through trash baskets, as the poet leafing through her own past, searching letters and memorabilia for clues, or, finally, as a woman retreating from "argument and jargon" to the kitchen, where she arranges treasured scraps on the table, forming them into a design.

To save, to salvage from the past what can be salvaged—this, not the incandescent demolition of such earlier poems as "Autumn," is the task Miss Rich now sets herself. (pp. 42-3)