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Time's Power
For thirty years, Rich's poetry has revealed the individual personal life—sexualities, loves, damages, struggles—as inseparable from a wider social condition, a world with others, in which the empowering of the disempowered is increasingly the source of human hope. Now her mature vision engages with the power of time itself: memory and its contradictions, the ebb and flow between parents and children, the deaths we all face sooner or later, the meaning of human responsibility in all this.
"Letters in the Family," for example, is written in the voices of three women—from the Spanish Civil War, from a Jewish rescue mission behind Nazi lines, and from present-day Southern Africa. Time's Power shows Rich writing with unprecedented range, complexity, and authority.
"Letters in the Family," for example, is written in the voices of three women—from the Spanish Civil War, from a Jewish rescue mission behind Nazi lines, and from present-day Southern Africa. Time's Power shows Rich writing with unprecedented range, complexity, and authority.
70 pages, Paperback
First published May 17, 1989
2 people are currently reading
137 people want to read
About the author
Adrienne Rich
139 books1,581 followersWorks, notably
Diving into the Wreck
(1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).
A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
June 23, 2025
Completely obliterated me. I'm in love.
February 4, 2017
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."
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."
November 10, 2019
Like the best poetry collections, one to be read again and again. Apparently less political than her previous work, yet patterned with a deep reckoning with race, austerity and much else, in those Reagan years, too much that still resonates today. From short, distilled pieces to longer, expansive ones, Rich is always questing, seeking, offering empathy rather than pat answer to other seekers.
December 16, 2025
“Someday if someday ever comes we'll go
back and reread those poems and manifestos
that so enraged us in each other's hand
I'll say, But damn, you wrote it so I
couldn't write it off You'll say
I read you always, even when I hated you”
back and reread those poems and manifestos
that so enraged us in each other's hand
I'll say, But damn, you wrote it so I
couldn't write it off You'll say
I read you always, even when I hated you”
August 16, 2015
This is one of those books you can read over, and over, and over again, finding something new each team. Rich presents imagery that spans time and continents while incorporating the tiniest detail to communicate her scenes. These poems are human and beautiful.
November 29, 2016
After having read this volume of Adrienne Riche's, I cannot wait to read another. This work is nothing less than masterful. It's a spell that you don't realize is unwinding around you until you're already lost in the magic of Rich's perfect composition.
August 6, 2023
A relatively uniform meditation on the force of time, most notably its cyclical and evolutionary nature.
Here, Rich gives special attention to the relationship between time and social change, exploring in further detail her decades earlier observation that "nothing can be done but by inches" (Diving Into the Wreck, 1973). This is most clearly reflected in "Turning" where Rich observes a collective recognition of women's rights as "no sudden revelation but the slow / turn of consciousness." Rich's meditations in this collection also extend to more personal topics which serve as microcosms of a decidedly female experience of time ("Solfeggietto," "Negotiations," "Sleep Walking Next To Death").
Although this collection far from tops what I consider to be Rich's best work, it's deeply introspective inquiry into ideas Rich has played with for years keeps her greatest admirers (that's me!) reading and re-reading every page.
Here, Rich gives special attention to the relationship between time and social change, exploring in further detail her decades earlier observation that "nothing can be done but by inches" (Diving Into the Wreck, 1973). This is most clearly reflected in "Turning" where Rich observes a collective recognition of women's rights as "no sudden revelation but the slow / turn of consciousness." Rich's meditations in this collection also extend to more personal topics which serve as microcosms of a decidedly female experience of time ("Solfeggietto," "Negotiations," "Sleep Walking Next To Death").
Although this collection far from tops what I consider to be Rich's best work, it's deeply introspective inquiry into ideas Rich has played with for years keeps her greatest admirers (that's me!) reading and re-reading every page.
April 18, 2019
Of all the Adrien Rich poems I've read (and I have read many), my favorite always are the political ones... And that was not what was in that collection mostly. The poems still were beautigul, and I like what she says about time, but I did not connect to this work as much as I did with other collections of hers. It's still very good and I would recommand it to people that love poetry. It's just not my favorite.
April 27, 2022
I tend to have a difficult time writing about/reviewing poetry. I'll say that I enjoyed this collection. Enjoying the process of reading is enough for me, without expanding on the poems' meaning. I think this is a collection I will revisit, and I will certainly seek out more of Adrienne Rich's works.
July 27, 2017
This entire collection is patient and beautiful, but nothing in these pages will stay with me longer than these lines from 'Dreamwood': "poetry / isn't revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come."
December 16, 2024
i was gonna read this with my work bestie and i was v excited but then i read the first two poems and mentioned it to bae and then bae told me adrienne rich was transphobic. googled it and i find out she wrote the intro to janice raymonds book 😢. terfs get 1 star
March 21, 2017
"My heart doesn't ache; sometimes though it rages."
April 30, 2018
There is something about the rhythm with which Rich writes that I find absolutely breathtaking. Her work draws me in, and I found myself pausing to sigh and close my eyes after certain poems.
February 9, 2009
I'm still not very good at reading poetry, and I found Adrienne Rich quite challenging. Some of her poems are as long as five pages! I would do a lot better reading this with someone instead of by myself.
August 26, 2014
Poetic Mumbo-Jumbo...I read this while concurrently reading Cormac MacCarthy's "The Road", there was more substance in the first three pages of "The Road" than there was in all 55 pages of Adrienne Rich's poetry.
...1-star!
...1-star!
August 31, 2014
History lessons that calm the mind. I love the precision of Rich.
January 10, 2016
Not her best. Not her worst.
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January 5, 2018"What if Absence calls and a voice answers in the accent of Home?"
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews