The Diamond Cutters

by Adrienne Rich

The Diamond Cutters, 1955, Adrienne Rich's second book of poems

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Works, 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).

Reviews

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 3 out of 5]

When this clangor in the brain
Grows perfunctory, or worse,
Put me down a sick old woman
Propped for sleep, hire me a nurse;
Till then, all things I look upon
Beat on my brain to hail and bless,
And every last and wayward power
I claim till then, and nothing less.

As far as I can tell, The Diamond Cutters went out of print soon after its 1955 publication and, unlike a lot of Rich's other books, stayed out of print until its inclusion in the recent Collected Poems 1950–2012. It's pretty easy to see why. Not that this collection is bad, exactly—it's just such a bizarrely mixed bag. Rich experiments with a lot of viewpoints here, narrators decades older than herself; a strange, lengthy Steinbeckian or Faulkernian verse (characters with names like Joel and Evans, something about a killing in a barn)—why? She was still a young, new poet at the time, and I can understand trying this stuff out, but I can't quite understand publishing it. Where did she think she was going to go from here? My are-you-serious meter probably buzzed loudest when I came upon a two-page poem about the Magi. Was the literary world clamoring for a poem about the Magi in 1955? Still, this poem, "Landscape of the Star," also contains my favorite lines in the collection: "Yet all are strange/ To their own ends, and their beginnings now/ Cannot contain them." In hindsight, it's impossible not to apply this sentiment to Rich herself.

I do realize that I look at Rich's very early poetry far too much through the lens of what her later work would be, and that isn't really fair to the poems themselves. Certainly, this is pretty precocious work for a 26-year-old. It may be only my imagination that Rich was trying on different personae because she hadn't yet figured out who she was, but The Diamond Cutters seems to be a pretty good illustration of what you get when you think you're telling the truth, versus when you know you are.

[Stanley (Stan) Enya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved A Change of World, but this was just not great as a whole... Some individual poems I quite liked.

[Magali · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not connect to this collection as much as I did with the other collections of poems by Adrienne Rich before. I don't really know why because the poems are really beautiful and the themes are important. Maybe I was just not in the mood, I'll have to go back to it another time to be sure I did not miss something.

[Professor Typewriter · Rating 2 out of 5]

To her credit, this volume of poetry was published early in Adrienne Rich’s career. The boldness, political commentary, feminist approach, postmodernism, and other features Rich is known for in her poetry will come later.
The collection that this work is serves the Rich fan and scholar well. Anyone interested in following Rich’s career will noticed that Rich adheres to the formal structure she began with as a Yale student in this collection while at the same time breaking away from traditional poetic structure.
Most of the poems are unremarkable, but the few poems that capture your attention you will come back to.

[Craig Werner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although The Diamond Cutters is clearly the least satisfying volume of Rich's long career, there are a handful of excellent poems written in a form defined by metrical constraint and late modernist uneasiness. Throughout, there's a sense of distance from lived experience, often expressed through poems that place the persona in a tourist's position. There's a strained attempt to cast poetic control as an adequate answer the underlying dis-ease: "Awhile/Mind's local jangling lightens, ear is eased, Eye's flaw is mended in such gazing, healed/By separation as through glass." The "heating," continent and untrustworthy, doesn't last long. Repeatedly, Rich returns to the world in which the equanimity collapses when "one imperfect gesture make[s[ demands/As troubling as the touch of human hands" ("Love in the Museum"). Knowing the later arc of Rich's career, it's impossible not to see an underlying dissatisfaction with domestic/marital relations in "Living in Sing," "The Snow Queen" and several of the long Frostian set pieces ("The Perennial Answer", which mostly don't work for me. I found myself taken by "Landscape of the Star," second cousin to Eliot's Magi poem and Yeats' "Second Coming." Invoking the modernist use of myth as commentary on contemporary experience (see Eliot's essay "Ulysses, Myth and Order"), she signals the commitment to process that will define her career: "Their only residence: the starlit hour,/ The landscape of the star, their time and place" and "The long unbroken journey, that all questions/ Sink like the lesser lights behind the hills; Think neither of the end in sight, nor all/That lies behind, but dreamlessly to ride,/Traveller at one with travelled countryside."

The journey will take on very new contours in the next book, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.

[Miriam Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a few gems here, but about half of these pieces disappoint in some way, often with weak endings. It interests me because with later work, strong finishes became Rich's signature. I suspect some of these poems she excluded from her first collection as inferior work but brought up again for a swift follow-up coup to the first book she published, a failed coup perhaps. It shows me she was aware - probably at publication - and knew where she needed to apply herself, a poet's growth.

[faith adams-michaels · Rating 2 out of 5]

reading this compared to her later works makes me believe that it does not matter if the first things you write are not even good, you can find your way to greatness

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be quite honest, I am not sure if I'm currently reviewing the right edition of this. Neither the cover nor the page number match, but it is the only edition of The Diamond Cutters I can find on goodreads.

Either way, I really enjoyed this collection. While some of the poems are uncharacteristically boring, others really spoke to me in a way not many poems from that time period do. The most prominent themes include belonging, home, and relationships, all of which the author used very thoughtfully. Moreover, I really enjoy Rich's style. Her writing does not read as old fashioned as I had initially anticipated, which was a very pleasant surprise foe me when I first started reading her poetry.

[Cagil · Rating 3 out of 5]

favorites: 'bears', 'the perennial answer', 'the tree'

[Mandy E · Rating 3 out of 5]

"But we have made another kind of peace,
And walk where boughs are green,
Forgiven by the selves that we have been,
And learning to forgive. Our apples taste
Sweeter this year; our gates are falling down,
And need not be replaced."
from "Letter From the Land of Sinners"

In these poems are a certain amount of stiffness and archaic speech, but many of the problems Rich deals with later in her better poems are seeded here.

" 'I'm sick, I guess—
I thought that life was different than it is."
from "Autumn Equinox"