Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998

by Adrienne Rich

The critically acclaimed, award-winning poet offers a new collection of poems that challenge many aspects of society while presenting her views on the world as it nears the end of the millennium.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Lesbian, Feminism, LGBT, Literature, 20th Century

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 1999

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]

Imagine a city where nothing's
forgiven
your deed adheres
to you like a scar, a tattoo
but almost everything's
forgotten...
—a city memory-starved but intent on retributions
Imagine the architecture
the governance
the men and the women in power
—tell me if it is not true you still
live in that city.

[Atri]

...all I wanted was to find
an old friend
an old figure
an old trigonometry
still true to our story in orbits
flaming or cold

***

...you and I are caught in
a laboratory without a science

***

Art doesn't keep accounts
though artists
do as they must

to stay alive
and tend their work
art is a register of light

***

This is for you
this little song
without much style
because your smile
fell like a red leaf
through my tears
in those fogbound
years
...
This little song
without much style
may it find you
somewhere well.

[La Central]

"Una voz guía en un laberinto colectivo, como verbo y como adjetivo. La resonancia de la escritura de Adrienne Rich entabla un diálogo abierto con su propia memoria e imaginación, actuando éstas como sus interlocutoras más inmediatas con la historia civil, las condiciones sociales y la herencia cultural americana de su momento, especialmente presentes en sus poemarios tardíos. Emprendiendo un viaje en todo sentido poético, Rich atraviesa la vida urbana con un lenguaje que debe a la naturaleza y al cuerpo la gran conciencia de la felicidad, donde acontece una fusión candente entre distintos elementos que buscan una libertad que haga posibles los derechos humanos. La ciudad y el cuerpo, igual de vivos, pueblan este poemario lleno de referencias geográficas y corpóreas que describen paisajes, tanto externos como internos, con la fuerza propia del trabajo de Rich.

Natalia Carbajosa, traductora también en Vaso Roto del segundo poemario de Dorothea Tanning, Si llegamos a eso, que vio la luz en su idioma original cuando la artista contaba ya un siglo de edad, realiza una traducción delicada y coherente, en un ritmo y composición de gran sonoridad, acorde al lenguaje libre del verso de Rich."

Lydia Merinero Crespo

[Kerri Anne]

This collection didn't quite sing to me the way other collections of Rich's have and continue to, but that isn't to say I wasn't moved. Her poetry always moves me, typically toward a supremely self-aware version of myself, and for that (and for good poetry) I'll always be grateful.

To me this collection feels more personal to her than it does overwhelmingly universal. There's something to love about that, too.

Some favorite lines, then:

"Who out there hoped to change me—
what out there has tried?"

"I have no theories. I don't know what I am being forgiven. I am
my art: I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine."

"Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it
means, to stand fast; what it means to move"

"That the books are for personal use
only—could I swear it?
That not a word of them
is contraband—how could I prove it?"

[Four stars for (Rich being Rich, yes, and) writing poetry for yourself while not fretting about how it will someday undoubtedly matter to someone else.]

[Kyle]

I've been making my way backwards through all of Rich's collections (there was a poetry sale; I bought everything I could find), so this is the fifth I've read, and the first that really floored me. Some truly beautiful lines, both small ("A life hauls itself uphill") and grand ("if a woman as vivid as any artist / can fling any day herself from the 14th floor // would it relieve you to decide Poetry / doesn't make this happen?"). The star of the collection, though, is the last poem, "A Long Conversation," running nearly twenty pages and totally engrossing the entire way through, balancing the political language of theorists like Marx ("All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not") with a very real anxiety and hope both on the individual and societal level. Really stunning.

[Mariana Rosas]

uff me pareció muy difícil, quisiera ser una mejor lectora de poesía :( en este caso no entendí muchas de las referencias. Claro que esto no quita que el uso de lenguaje y las imágenes son muy bellas. Mi favorita: cuando se habla de “los primeros tesoros” de la infancia, canicas, centavos y piedritas.

[lou]

the most overtly political work of adrienne's i've read so far (quoting at length from the communist manifesto, etc.), and also very lovely as all of her work is. "art is a register of light"

[olivia *:･ﾟ✧]

Adrienne Rich reminds me the beauty of flowery wording - and how much I need to expand my vocabulary, apparently.

[Gonza M Fontán]

I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love.

Amé

[Adèle]

nine o’clock: July : the light
undrained : that blotted blue
that lets has let will let
…
and all i wanted was to find an old
friend an old figure an old trigonometry
still true to our story in orbits flaming or cold

[Patricia N. McLaughlin]

In this collection, Rich seems to be salvaging a piecemeal language from the scrap heap of patriarchal discourse—

“thought’s blood ebb between life- and death-time
darkred behind darkblue
bad new pulsing back and forth of ‘us’ and ‘them’”

—and engaging in a conversation with herself, rendering these pieces more like internal monologues than poems. As the poet writes, “All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not,” even if you’re relegated to the margins of understanding. Nonetheless, Rich’s musings are always fascinating.

“I have no theories. I don’t know what I am being forgiven. I am my art: I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. I still get up and go to the studio—it’s there I find the company I need to go on working.”
—from “A Long Conversation,” p. 67


Favorite Poems:
“Midnight Salvage”
“Modotti”
“Seven Skins”
“‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes’”
“Rusted Legacy”

[Tom Hill]

"To have seen you exactly, once:
red hair over cold cheeks fresh from the freeway
your lingo, your daunting and dauntless
eyes"

There were poems and pieces of poems that I really enjoyed. A lot of Rich's work here is not as accessible as I would have liked, although maybe that simply means these poems need to be read more than once to be fully appreciated. Complexity is not a bad thing, but I like to read a poem that hits me the first (or second time) I read it. One is not always in the mood to pick apart a poem line by line.

"Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it
means, to stand fast; what it means to move"

[Sandra]

I feel this volume has a retrospective flavor. However, in several of these somewhat long, sectioned poems, I am never quite sure to whom Rich is talking: her younger self, an old friend, a lover, a mix of many past encounters in the flesh and on the page, perhaps the merging of them. In some, it is clear who is addressed, e. g. “Modotti.” Lines that leapt out and brought me into a sliver of communion with Rich come from “Letters to a Young Poet” (29):

I wanted to go somewhere
the brain had not yet gone
I wanted not to be
there so alone.

[k]

i found this collection to be more esoteric and less evocative than usual. she's written so much poetry that it was only inevitable i'd find a collection that leaves me bored and unimpressed

from "Letters to a Young Poet"

It’s not the déjà vu that kills
it’s the foreseeing
the head that speaks from the crater

I wanted to go somewhere
the brain had not yet gone
I wanted not to be
there so alone.

[Bennett]

“—I have no theories. I don't know what I am being forgiven. I am my art: I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I still get up and go to the studio—it's there I find the company I need to go on working.”

[Stephen Lamb]

Imagine a city partitioned divorced from its hills
where temples and telescopes used to probe the stormy codices
a city brailling through fog
thicket and twisted wire
into dark’s velvet dialectic

[Kaiju Reviews]

I'm glad I finally read some Adrienne Rich, but ultimately these poems didn't resonate with me.

[Magali]

A powerful collection.

[brunston]

And all I wanted was to find an old
friend an old figure an old trigonometry
still true to our story in orbits flaming or cold

[Michael P.]

Yes, a louse can write a great book. A four-star book from a one-star human being.

[Gemma Laurence]

Every poem of Adrienne’s is a gem

[faith adams-michaels]

you and I are caught in a laboratory without science

[Dani]

some gems in here, but for me it was too abstract

[Violeta]

Tiene algunos poemas preciosos pero, realmente, después de leer "Sueño de una lengua común" este libro pasa un poco desapercibido, es más una reunión de poemas sueltos.

[Rachel]

I know Adrienne Rich mostly via citations about her feminist work, so it was exciting to finally pick up some of her writing. There were some really gorgeous poems in here, and I loved how she broke apart language in ways that made me think and pay attention.

[Craig Werner]

At the end of the century approached, Rich found herself gazing at a world in which the sense of decay, of loss, pervaded everything. (And yes, it would get worse.) In the last section of the title poem, she muses on "Old walls the pride of architects collapsing/ find us in crazed niches sleeping like foxes/ we wanters we unwanted we/ wanted for the crime of being ourselves." Both the identification with the fox, which would provide the title of her next book, and the sense of seeking a place within a collapsed tradition--echoing Eliot--establish motifs that grow in importance in the coming years. She diagnoses our conditio: "you won't get quite/ of this: the worst of the new news/ history running back and forth/ panic in the labyrinth."

In that situation, the poet's task, as she eleborates in "Letters to a Young Poet" is to keep faith with the idea of connection: "Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it/ means , to sand fast: what it means to move." Note the colons (and sometimes they're doubled). I've been thinking about them since I first read the book and come to a very tentative conclusion that they're a way of acknowledging the tentativeness of images, juxtapositions, signals of a mind testing phrasings. At times, she catches glimpses of potential, "A kind of alchemy, a study of transformation," as she writes in "Camino Real," one of the strongest poems in a volume best read as a whole.

It's an underground vision, and Rich identifies it as such, pondering "at what depth which layer/ will we meet others?" After long struggles, which aren't over, with the American poetic tradition, she honors Whitman as one of those others when she nods to his catalogs and his witness: "O to list collate commensurate to quantigy I was the one, I suffered, I was there."

Along with "Letters to a Young Poet" and "Camino Real," go to "Shattered Head"--powerful and disturbing for its clear vision of violence--to get a taste of the book at its best.

[Knar]

I'll share a couple of snags I enjoyed, from two poems:

"Hart Miles Muriel Julia Paul
you will meet the eyes you were searching for

and the day will break

as we say, it breaks
as we don't say, of the night

as we don't say of the night"

(From "Seven Skins")

.

And, against Coleridge's lament about the "'epicurean / selfishness'" of those who saw "the complete failure of the French Revolution" (1799):

"A generation later, revolutions scorching Europe:
the visionaries having survived despite
rumors of complete failure

[...] After so long, to be asked an opinion? ... Along the way I was dropped by some; others could say I had dropped them. I tried to make in my studio what I could not make outside it. Even to have a studio, or a separate room to sleep in, was a point in fact. In case you miss the point: I come from hod-carriers, lint-pickers, people who hauled cables through half-dug tunnels. Their bodies created the possibility of my existence. I come from the kind of family where loss means not just grief but utter ruin—adults and children dispersed into prostitution, orphanages, juvenile prisons, emigration—never to meet again. I wanted to show those lives—designated insignificant— as beauty, as terror ... I tried to show all this and as well to make an art as impersonal as it demanded. I have no theories. I don't know what I am being forgiven. I am my art: I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I still get up and go to the studio—there I find the company I need to go on working" (from "An Long Conversation," the closing poem).

[Kat]

The poems I could make sense of, I liked all right. I can't remember the title of the memorial poem for a Latin American photographer (whose name also escapes me), but I liked that poem. Mostly, I found her political poems tended to border on the boring/trite, and her more personal poems tended to require more untangling work than I felt like giving them. This is the only book of Rich's poetry I've read; I have found her theory (specifically her classic essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence") fairly lucid and useful.

[Celeste]

There are some really stunning lines in these poems, a lot of experimentation. I must admit I don't understand every thing Adrienne Rich does with her poetry...especially the use of : and :: in her poems, but I'm looking forward to giving these poems a second read to delve deeper into them.

[Cristina]

I heard Rich read from this collection. The auditorium was so quiet as she read. Her voice was powerful. Her words were powerful on their own. I can still hear her voice when I read her poems. I have the poems that she read from this collection marked.