While continuing to explore themes taken up in other poems (such as the power of language), “North American Time” places these concerns in the context not of new discoveries but of continued struggle. As in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, Rich rejects the Romantic emphasis on certain peaks of perception and, instead, focuses on the daily struggle to change the world through quiet strength and resistance. In Your Native Land, Your Life, Rich continues to explore the ways that common experience, especially the natural and indigenous scenes of her “native land,” provides the raw material of art that becomes the artist’s life.

The phrase that gives the title to the collection occurs in a poem titled “Emily Carr,” about the Canadian artist who paints totem poles of the Northwest Coast Indians. It encapsulates the importance of art rooted both in landscape and in traditions, especially those of minorities. Rich continues to incorporate the past, on a personal level by analyzing the powerful relationship with her father and the role of her background, and on a general level by attending to the indigenous history of the United States and its connections to the rest of the world.

The collection echoes the tripartite structure of The Dream of a Common Language, with sections titled “Sources,” “North American Time,” and “Contradictions: Tracking Poems.” The poem “North American Time” is part of the second section. In this poem in nine parts, Rich takes stock of her accomplishments as a poet and discusses the connection of poetry to history. She begins to wonder about these matters in the first verse, when she fears that her poetry has become circumscribed and predictable. As she explains in subsequent verses, the issue not only is one of personal importance but also has wider ramifications because, once words become part of the world, they take on a life of their own; they escape the speaker’s control and can be used in a way the speaker never intended.

Attempts to deny political responsibility are futile, Rich maintains, and she goes on to sketch connections between “North American Time” and other world events, figures, and places that are routinely denied or ignored because of ethnocentrism. This attention to lost or muted voices becomes an increasingly important theme in Rich’s work, as her sensitivity to the suppression of women’s culture makes her aware also of the erasure of American Indian, black, and other minority experiences.

Rich views herself as a kind of messenger, a prophet or seer, called upon to engage the reader with these issues, and uses this image, which she admits is rather grandiose, as an incentive to continue writing and speaking out. She concludes by characteristically incorporating the words of another woman writer, the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, and, as she watches the moon rise over New York City, an image that portends change, she shifts from introspection to action—that is, speech.

The attention to the lives of other women (artists, writers, explorers, and scientists) is one of Rich’s enduring concerns. In this poem, Rich both quotes de Burgos and refers to other women whose names have been erased from the “almanac” of North American time. In this collection, as in her previous work, such allusions are pervasive and telling. Such “re-visions” (a central concern of literature, as Rich explained in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence), are an inspiration to Rich, a celebration of the buried traditions of women’s writings she has excavated elsewhere, and a benchmark for women’s experience.