Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 Book

As Rich entered her 70s, she began looking back in a different way than she'd previously done. You could look at the book as a long conversation with/meditation on the ghosts/legacy of the Sixties and Seventies. In "Skeleton Key," she ends a section that begins "Cut me a skeleton key/ to that other time, that city/ talk starting up, deals and poetry," with an acknowledgement that she is "Exhuming the dead / Their questions." She circles back repeatedly to the sense that that era was, in fundamental ways, different than what was to follow: "But as for living at that time/ we were all living together with many others/ for whom living was precisely the question" ("Even Then Maybe"). Among those others, the Leroi Jones of The Dead Lecturer (not to be confused with the Amiri Baraka of Black Art),who she addressees directly in "Rereading The Dead Lecturer," which balances on the knife edge between regret and affirmation of "An idea. And we felt it./ A meaning. And we caught it/ as the dimensions spread," conversations "scrawled with smoke and music." Whatever his contradictions and limits, Jones wrote, as Rich concludes the poem a "(book of a soul contending."

All of that against the backdrop of the Bush era with it's "Excruciating contempt for love/ For the strained fibre of common affection, mutual assistance" ("Draft #2006"). Like the smoke and music--I can't help thinking of Paul Simon's "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls"--Rich listens for "Contraband packets, hummed messages. Dreams of the/ descendants, surfacing." At several key points, wearily but with a sense of surprised wonder, she turns her eyes to the cosmos. In "Hubble Photographs: After Sappho," she turns to "the ex-stasis of galaxies/ so out from us there's no vocabulary/ but mathematics and optics/ equestions letting sight pierce through time/..."beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream/ beyonw remorse, disilluison/ fear of death."

It's not somewhere she can or would rest or remain. Rather, as she has done again and again for more than four decades, she recommits herself to the poet's work, seeking to forge an "instrument searching, probing/ toward a foreign tongue" ("Long After Stevens"). It matters because without clear honest articulation, the descendants will find themselves lost: "You think you are helpless because you are empty-handed/ of concepts that could become your strength" ("Letters Censored Shredded Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send"). Feeling age, knowing death isn't abstract, she turns to the task "Not for me/ but for furtherance," for the descendant, "You, the person, you/ the particle fierce and furthering."

Among the highlights: "Skeleton Key," "Archaic," "Long After Stevens," Hubble Photographs: After Sappho," "Midnight, the Same Day," "Rereading The Dead Lecturer," "Letters Censored," "Draft #2006" and the unforgettable "The Burning Kangaroo," which I'm sure will be showing up in my dreams.