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“... Adrienne Rich’s new poems show qualities that almost require the label ‘late style’. They are made up of fragments, careless of finish and of audience. In technique, as well as in explicit subjects, they account for debilities and advancing years, which they also fiercely defy, and they look back so insistently to her earlier work that they may not seem designed to stand up on their own ...”

“... Adrienne Rich’s​ poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist (dating from, say, the Occupy movement through #MeToo to Black Lives Matter) that it’s astounding – no, instructive – to realise they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago:at your tabletelephone ringsevery four minutestalkof terrible thingsthe papers bringingno good news                                (‘New York’)False history gets made all day, any day,the truth of the new is never on the news                                (‘Turning the Wheel’)There is a cop who is both prowler and father …You have to confessto him, you are guilty of the crimeof having been forced                                (‘Rape’)Suppose you want to writeof a woman braidinganother woman’s hair –straight down, or with beads and shellsin three-strand plaits or corn-rows –you had better know the thicknessthe length the patternwhy she decides to braid her hairhow it is done to herwhat country it happens inwhat else happens in that country                                (‘North American Time’)Her essays employ an argot that contemporary opinion pieces might have cribbed from: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction ...”

“... a time ‘when, far in the future, the human race has exterminated itself.’) For a time, Adrienne Rich believed that what was destroying itself was patriarchy: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out,’ she wrote in 1971, ‘what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction’ (‘When We Dead Awaken’). Women’s ...”

“... Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.’ So writes Adrienne Rich in a poem from An Atlas of a Difficult World, opening an unpunctuated sequence of horrors: lynchings, pogroms, Auschwitz, Berlin, Palestine, Israel: I am accused of child death   of drinking blood ... there is spit on my sleeve    there are phone-calls in the night ...”

“... idiomatic speech for a mythic Kingdom-Comeparlance, while the narrative itself dissolves into Adrienne Rich-ish poetry. Take this sentence: Consolata listened to the refusing silence, more wondering than annoyed by the sky, in plumage now, gold and blue-green, strutting like requited love on the horizon. Or this one: Speeding toward the ...”

“... importance are the poets of his own generation: Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop. There are more letters to Bishop than to anybody else. For thirty years Lowell and Bishop admired and influenced one another’s poetry and took unusual trouble over their letters. Lowell often spoke of his admiration for her ...”

“... of women. The book’s second ‘passage’ demands considerable courage of the reader, as Adrienne Rich found when she reviewed it for the New York Times. It is an appalling catalogue of infibulation, foot-binding, witch-burning, suttee, and ‘modern’ gynaecological procedures with their often gratuitous ovarectomies, episiotomies and radical ...”

“... She was good at the business end of poetry too, an adept self-promoter, networker and marketer. Adrienne Rich remembered Sexton’s poise and elegant good looks at a Boston party. As Middlebrook notes, ‘success in the poetry business resembled success in the wool business.’ Salesmanship and marketing certainly helped. Moreover, despite her patchy ...”

“... explorations of the mother-daughter bond in the formation of women’s consciousness (the bond Adrienne Rich said was patriarchal society’s ‘great unwritten story’), O’Brien posits this strong current in Cather’s life, ‘possibly more intense for her as a lesbian than for heterosexual women, since her lovers directly reinvoked the dynamic ...”

“... shared with other women’: this is Jan Montefiore’s understanding of the position taken by Adrienne Rich.) It’s a tenet upheld by both radical feminists and anti-feminists, this matter of ‘indifference’. The Anti lot aren’t averse to turning the arguments of the others to their own invidious ends. Ivan Illich, in his book Gender, can ...”

“... nationality. He ‘rises above’ such matters – and, by just so much, he pushes them down. Adrienne Rich was right to be angry when friends said they found her poems ‘universal’: she heard ‘a denial, a kind of resistance, a refusal to read and hear what I’ve actually written, to acknowledge what I am.’ In ‘The Redress of ...”

“... poems let some of us say about them what Helen Vendler once said about the early books of Adrienne Rich: ‘someone my age was writing down my life.’ Kasischke has chronicled her generation, the generation where wild kids learned to smoke, and then learned, as adults, never to smoke: the memory of youthful cigarettes, in her poem ...”

“... were rigorous and concise. It would be easy enough to claim her, along with Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, as one of the most important women writing poetry in English in the decades after the Second World War, if ‘woman poet’ hadn’t been a category Levertov despised. ‘Among Jews a Goy, among Gentiles … a Jew or at least a half-Jew ...”

“... it is, without immediately divesting the newborn of her or his humanity. ‘Every infant born,’ Adrienne Rich writes in Of Woman Born (1976), her meditation on being a mother, ‘is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity.’ The rest of the book relentlessly charts the way motherhood as an institution crushes that ...”

“... post hoc, by the size of the rent it has left in the ideal lyric. Thus Vendler has censured Adrienne Rich for political lecturing, and Anne Sexton for sentimentality. In Soul Says, she chastises Robinson Jeffers for affectation and bombast. Vendler’s detractors call this a narrow aesthetic. They are right, but for the wrong reasons. It is narrow ...”