The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Book

Muriel Rukeyser earned an international reputation as a powerful voice against enforced silences of all kind, against the violence of war, poverty, and racism.

In addition to the complete texts of her twelve previously published books, this volume also features new poems discovered by the editors; Rukeyser's translations, including the first English translations of Octavio Paz's work; early work by Rukeyser not previously published in book form; and the controversial book-length poem ‘Wake Island.’

Publishers Weekly

One of the most admired poets of the American left, Rukeyser (1914-1980) is in the midst of a revival: this enormous collection should help keep the spotlight on her work. Rukeyser's early poems (1935's Theory of Flight, 1938's U.S. 1) melded modernist surfaces with outspoken Popular Front politics. The best known (and best) of her many sequences, "The Book of the Dead" (1938), chronicles corporate negligence at a West Virginia construction project: "Almost as soon as work was begun in the tunnel/ men began to die among dry drills." As her star waned after the Second World War, she continued to enunciate bold hopes: "Let me tell you what I have known all along," she asked in 1949: "meaning of poetry and personal love,/ a world of peace and freedom." Later odes and longer poems praised Rukeyser's heroes, among them Kathe Kollwitz, Herman Melville, the Jewish folk-hero Rabbi Akiba, the New England entrepreneur Timothy Dexter and the physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs. Though the would-be mythic poems she produced in the 1950s are now hard to read, her decade of work returned to her fiery strengths; drawing her forms, at times, from tribal chants, her energies from protest movements, Rukeyser hoped to "recognize at the other edge of ocean/ a new kind of man a new kind of woman." (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.