Time's Power: Poems, 1985-1988 Book

When I first read Time's Power, it was clear to me that it marked a change of register in Rich's work, moving the explicit politics--especially but not exclusively the gender politics and her critique of patriarchy--into a relatively subordinate role. It was the volume that sparked a realization that Rich's career was shaping up as comparable to Yeats', perhaps the poet whose work underwent the most fundamental series of changes over a long life. Then, I was primarily aware of the looming presence of death, as signaled by the title.

That reaction wasn't exactly wrong. In "Sleepwalking Next to Death," she writes: "It has always/ been about death and chances," cycling back to the theme near the end of the book in "Living Memory," where she insists that "All we can read is life. Death is invisible." The emotional climax of the poem rises out of a ceremonial moment: "When Selma threw/ her husband's ashes into the Hudson/ and they blew back on her and on us, her friends/ it was life. Our blood raced in that gritty wind." Beautiful.

On this reading, however, several other aspects of the book seemed equally central to me. Rich comes back several times to questions of what culture--music, poetry, reading--avails in the face of death and destruction: In "In Memorium: D.K.," she muses: "And what good will it do you/ to go home and put on the Mozart Requieum?/ Read Keat? How will culture cure you?"

Even more deeply--above all in the sequence "The Desert as Garden of Paradise," Rich sets herself to forging a kind of desert strategy for survival in the face of the depressing, seemingly never-ending Reagan years. "Every drought-resistant plant has its own story/ each had to learn to live/ with less and less water." In "Dreamwood," a poem which hit me very hard this time and which I hadn't remembered at all," she writes: "If this were a map/ it would be the map of the last age of her life,/ not a map of choice but a map of variations/ on the one great choice."

Finally, Time's Power is much more "political" than I'd recalled. The politics are less ideological than they'd been for a while (the backing away from certain sorts of abstract phrases--necessary but not sufficient--began in Your Native Land, Your Life), it's still a highly charged political book. What's different is that Rich is very clearly expanding her focus to center on the global scene and history that had been relatively subordinate earlier. (Part of that was her determination to deal with race in the U.S., a process that continues here in "Harper's Ferry.") The image pool extens outward to Catalona, Yugoslavia, Southe African, Palestine, and the Mexican border, in ways that resonate all too powerfully in 2017.

I'd valued the book before, but not enough. Recommended poems: "Negotiations," "The Desert as Garden of Paradise," "Delta," "Living Memory" and above all "Sleepwalking," "Dreamwood," and "Harper's Ferry."