Adrienne Rich's [The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977] frustrates oblique approaches and defies moderate responses. Breathtakingly beautiful and moving for the most part, it is sometimes depressingly narrow and mean. Nor is there enough between to allow one to relax into qualified judgments without misrepresenting the book. Even when the good and the bad float in the same medium, they rarely dissolve into the merely interesting or the mediocre. Still, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 is a unified project, not just a collection of poems, and it is sobering to contemplate the possibility that Rich could not have accomplished the best without doing her worst.

The unity of the volume springs from what we might think of as a pair of interrelated myths that it articulates bit by bit. One of them … concerns female identity. (p. 83)

[If] being a whole woman means being able to apprehend the self as a whole, Rich has made herself into one. Her thoughts and feelings are sensations. (p. 84)

When Rich turns from women's struggles with themselves to the oppressive society her eloquence turns to rant…. Men, "all of them," according to Rich's Paula Becker, feed on women, who seem sometimes to love men but must actually be dissembling. In short, the male is a "predator," a "parasite."

Some of these judgments are offered in contexts that might permit qualification, but Rich is not interested in hedging…. Rich has begun to solve the problem of the imperfect world by dividing human nature into two parts and identifying the worthwhile part with her group. The knot that we might have thought human nature was, is actually a fiction, the result of tying together in our minds the female virtues and the male vices…. (pp. 85-6)

It would seem that you could cross horses with griffons before you could combine Rich's intelligent sensitivity with her flagrant simplisms. Yet here they are together. Either the latter must be calculated gestures that warp and provoke in order that they might be attended to at all, in which case they are on a par with television commercials and political harangues and fail her own test for preservation …, or they are cries of excruciating occasions, reckless expressions of terror, hatred, and longing that have a certain dramatic truth, in which case they deserve preservation but can hardly be thought steps on the way to any truly common language. This is an important book grievously flawed. (p. 86)