Across the Layers: Poems Old and New Book

I've been making my way backwards through all of Rich's collections (there was a poetry sale; I bought everything I could find), so this is the fifth I've read, and the first that really floored me. Some truly beautiful lines, both small ("A life hauls itself uphill") and grand ("if a woman as vivid as any artist / can fling any day herself from the 14th floor // would it relieve you to decide Poetry / doesn't make this happen?"). The star of the collection, though, is the last poem, "A Long Conversation," running nearly twenty pages and totally engrossing the entire way through, balancing the political language of theorists like Marx ("All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not") with a very real anxiety and hope both on the individual and societal level. Really stunning.