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Your Native Land, Your Life
A major American poet faces her own native land, her own life, and the result is a volume of compelling, transforming poems. The book includes two extraordinary longer works: the self-exploratory "Sources" and "Contradictions―Tracking Poems," an ongoing index of an American woman's life.
The poet writes, "In these poems I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak of a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased. I believe more than ever that the search for justice and compassion is the great wellspring for poetry in our time, throughout the world, though the theme of despair has been canonized in this country. I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so."
The poet writes, "In these poems I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak of a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased. I believe more than ever that the search for justice and compassion is the great wellspring for poetry in our time, throughout the world, though the theme of despair has been canonized in this country. I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so."
122 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1986
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About the author
Adrienne Rich
139 books1,583 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 - 23 of 23 reviews
January 21, 2017
I know I've been starting all of my reviews of Rich's volumes with some variation on "Rich in transition." So at least this won't be a surprise. But there are ways in which this joins Snapshots-of-a-Daughter-in-Law as a major turning point i the poet's long career. A large part of that has to do with her explicit, central emphasis on the complications of her Jewish heritage, complicated by her father's distancing of the heritage which was itself complicated by living on the borders of the American South (Baltimore). At the same time, Your Native Land, Your Life collects Rich's poems of the early Reagan years, when it was becoming ever more depressingly clear that the progressive/radical politics of the Sixties had, in the most important ways, lost. As a result, Rich is re-trenching, thinking about what to do and how to write in response to, as she writes in the second poem of the "Contradictions" series: "My country wedged fast in history/ stuck in the ice." (Pause to say that I'm writing this the day after Trump's inauguration--the present tense impact of Rich's work remains disquieting. In honor of her ferocity, I won't say "depressing.")
In the long-opening sequence, "Sources," Rich focuses on Jewishness, restating the question that had emerged in her work of the 70s: "With whom do you believe your lot is cast?/ From where does your strength come?" Refusing the "end of history" gibberish propagated by the neo-cons of the Reagan years, she observes that "The place where all tracks end/ is the place where history was meant to stop/ but does not stop." Rather it is the place "where the pattern was meant to give way at last/ but only/ becomes a different pattern."
In the rest of Your Native Land, she engages the changing forms of oppression and exploitation, aware that the most useful ideas will no longer circulate in the public sphere. Rather, they come from "the ignored the unforeseen that which breaks/ despair which has always travelled/ underground." She'll be thinking about the possibility and the contours of that "underground revolution" for the rest of her life.
The other emerging element in Your Native Land is the reality of physical pain in Rich's life; that too would remain with her. "The problem, unstated till now, is how/ to live in a damaged body/....to connect, without hysteria, the pain/ of any one's body with the pain of the body's world." In the final poem of the closing sequence, "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," she returns to the image, acknowledging that "the body's pain and the pain on the streets/ are not the same" but continuing "but you can learn/ from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges/ more than anything watch the edges that blur."
The power of Your Native Land rests primarily on the long sequences, "Sources" and "Contradictions," which should really be read complete. But if you're looking for a sampling, start with "North American Time," "One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem" and "In the Wake of Home" and then poems 7, 12, 18 and 23 of "Sources" and 2, 5, 13 and 29 of "Contradictions."
In the long-opening sequence, "Sources," Rich focuses on Jewishness, restating the question that had emerged in her work of the 70s: "With whom do you believe your lot is cast?/ From where does your strength come?" Refusing the "end of history" gibberish propagated by the neo-cons of the Reagan years, she observes that "The place where all tracks end/ is the place where history was meant to stop/ but does not stop." Rather it is the place "where the pattern was meant to give way at last/ but only/ becomes a different pattern."
In the rest of Your Native Land, she engages the changing forms of oppression and exploitation, aware that the most useful ideas will no longer circulate in the public sphere. Rather, they come from "the ignored the unforeseen that which breaks/ despair which has always travelled/ underground." She'll be thinking about the possibility and the contours of that "underground revolution" for the rest of her life.
The other emerging element in Your Native Land is the reality of physical pain in Rich's life; that too would remain with her. "The problem, unstated till now, is how/ to live in a damaged body/....to connect, without hysteria, the pain/ of any one's body with the pain of the body's world." In the final poem of the closing sequence, "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," she returns to the image, acknowledging that "the body's pain and the pain on the streets/ are not the same" but continuing "but you can learn/ from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges/ more than anything watch the edges that blur."
The power of Your Native Land rests primarily on the long sequences, "Sources" and "Contradictions," which should really be read complete. But if you're looking for a sampling, start with "North American Time," "One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem" and "In the Wake of Home" and then poems 7, 12, 18 and 23 of "Sources" and 2, 5, 13 and 29 of "Contradictions."
August 5, 2025
i love adrienne rich so much when i think about her i want to cry
finally read this whole book because moving back in with my parents was inspiring a crisis and it did help at least a little bit! some really incredible observations of america as a colonial state and as always some incredible imagery.
finally read this whole book because moving back in with my parents was inspiring a crisis and it did help at least a little bit! some really incredible observations of america as a colonial state and as always some incredible imagery.
April 15, 2019
In this (beautiful) collection, Rich talks about her identities, about being jewish, about being a woman, about being queer, about being a poet, about being an aging woman... I loved it, eventhough it felt a little less angry maybe than other poems of hers (I love it when her poems are angry).
September 3, 2024
A collection for thresholds. For the edges of things, nuanced. For the looking back and forward and being all at once. For grief. For the through-threads of hope.
February 20, 2025
"What would it feel like to know / your country was changing?-- / You yourself must change it. / Though your life felt arduous / new and unmapped and strange / what would it mean to stand on the first / page of the end of despair?"
Most of the poems in this book are dated 1983, two years before I was born. I'm now 40. Adrienne Rich, who was 56 years old when I was born, died in 2012. That's a lot of math.
Jewish. Queer. Feminist. Rich would be dismissed today as "woke" -- whatever the fuck that means.
I've read some of her earlier work. This seems more haunted, by both her upbringing, her Jewishness, and the prospect of the rest of her life -- which it turns out would be about 29 more years.
Only in hindsight will anyone be able to determine at which point you passed from being closer to the date of your birth to closer to the date of your death. The midpoint. I borrow the idea from Billy Collins but it's startling, ain't it? That jazz-obsessed Mr. Rogers of the poetry world.
These poems are from the early Reagan era, when the last vestiges of the New Deal were gutted and when productivity began to skyrocket past wages. Clinton, of course, was instrumental in killing the New Deal, too.
So many of our current evils have their roots in the 80s, which ended, as we all know, with the end of history. America supporting the mujahedeen and Saddam Hussein, neoliberalist ascendancy, the beginnings of the evangelical right's crusade to power, etc. All the emptiness that war and late-stage capitalism can bring, and here we are with a weirdo fascist movement in control of the federal government.
Nothing gets better, not really. Not with this country, and not permanently. As I write this, DuPont continues to poison the river from which my drinking water is drawn. They won't be punished for this. Certainly not now. So, all there really is, is the choice between despair, which ends in early death -- or not despair, which I cannot define.
I'm so far away from this being any kind of review but, dear reader, that's how all of my reviews go. So, I wish you an existence as free from suffering as possible, and I'm sorry that you're here.
Most of the poems in this book are dated 1983, two years before I was born. I'm now 40. Adrienne Rich, who was 56 years old when I was born, died in 2012. That's a lot of math.
Jewish. Queer. Feminist. Rich would be dismissed today as "woke" -- whatever the fuck that means.
I've read some of her earlier work. This seems more haunted, by both her upbringing, her Jewishness, and the prospect of the rest of her life -- which it turns out would be about 29 more years.
Only in hindsight will anyone be able to determine at which point you passed from being closer to the date of your birth to closer to the date of your death. The midpoint. I borrow the idea from Billy Collins but it's startling, ain't it? That jazz-obsessed Mr. Rogers of the poetry world.
These poems are from the early Reagan era, when the last vestiges of the New Deal were gutted and when productivity began to skyrocket past wages. Clinton, of course, was instrumental in killing the New Deal, too.
So many of our current evils have their roots in the 80s, which ended, as we all know, with the end of history. America supporting the mujahedeen and Saddam Hussein, neoliberalist ascendancy, the beginnings of the evangelical right's crusade to power, etc. All the emptiness that war and late-stage capitalism can bring, and here we are with a weirdo fascist movement in control of the federal government.
Nothing gets better, not really. Not with this country, and not permanently. As I write this, DuPont continues to poison the river from which my drinking water is drawn. They won't be punished for this. Certainly not now. So, all there really is, is the choice between despair, which ends in early death -- or not despair, which I cannot define.
I'm so far away from this being any kind of review but, dear reader, that's how all of my reviews go. So, I wish you an existence as free from suffering as possible, and I'm sorry that you're here.
March 19, 2025
RAHHHHHHH my goodness
July 6, 2025
Quickly becoming one of my new favorite poets. Esoteric yet accessible.
January 20, 2020
I was all set to say that these poems were not among my favorites of Rich's--but then I got to the second section. The second section of the book consists of 29 short poems, which the book jacket copy calls "an ongoing index of an American woman's life." A number of these spoke intensely to me, in that way Rich has of digging right through skin and gristle and bone to her reader's core. There were also moments of brilliance in the first section, "North American Time," but that rush of recognition and feeling came at longer intervals than in the second half. Worth a read in any case if you are a fan of Rich's poetry.
May 19, 2025
LORD she was a genius
April 21, 2024
I got a beautiful first edition of this for $5! But I might regift it--I think another reader would get more out of the collection than I did.
The poetry in here seems borne of Adrienne's relationship with her father, her "native land" (New England, which, it so happens, is also my native land), Judaism, and to a lesser extent, her lovers (lesbianism fans might find this one lacking). I think this book has a lot to say about the political obligations of poetry as they pertain to place. I also was pleasantly surprised by the overtly anti-Zionist poems--which are more relevant than ever in 2024.
HOWEVER (and I can't find an unpretentious way to make this point) I just... prefer Rich as an essayist/intellectual than as a poet. my preference for poetry is on the more rhythmic/lyrical side. not to say that this is by any means bad, and i endorse its messages, but it's just not always to my aesthetic taste.
The poetry in here seems borne of Adrienne's relationship with her father, her "native land" (New England, which, it so happens, is also my native land), Judaism, and to a lesser extent, her lovers (lesbianism fans might find this one lacking). I think this book has a lot to say about the political obligations of poetry as they pertain to place. I also was pleasantly surprised by the overtly anti-Zionist poems--which are more relevant than ever in 2024.
HOWEVER (and I can't find an unpretentious way to make this point) I just... prefer Rich as an essayist/intellectual than as a poet. my preference for poetry is on the more rhythmic/lyrical side. not to say that this is by any means bad, and i endorse its messages, but it's just not always to my aesthetic taste.
May 2, 2024
wtf.. goodreads doesn't have a picture of this amazing first edition i picked up at canios. im upset because its first edition and i randomly picked this up and randomly loved it, it's very timely.... AND im upset because canios is closing down. one of my favorite bookstores in this world. sad but .. when i was in there last weekend i was sort of going.. "it's interesting that my favorite bookstore ever is one where the owner is SO MEAN."
November 6, 2025
Adrienne Rich, you have taken feelings I never knew and put them into pieces of text I love too much to simply boil them down to poems. This is the first book of Rich's that I have read and she has quickly put her name in the ring for favorite author. This was utterly fantastic
December 22, 2020
This collection of Rich's poems is so far my favorite one. So wonderful.
Want to read
May 29, 2025Cutting is for Contradictions-Tracking
Poems
By Adrienne Rich
Poems
By Adrienne Rich
August 12, 2022
Another great Adrienne Rich book. i especially like the poems about finding a place in America and the interrogation of what it means to be a poet.
May 30, 2009
This collection is poorly written in a number of important ways. First, Your Native Land, Your Life refuses to follow any patterns on the page. There is no logic to the enjambment, the spacing and punctuation is inconsistent (even within the same poem), and Rich's use of italics lacks purpose or subtlety.
As far as music, it comes and goes. I only give this collection two stars because of a few brief moments where Rich temporarily goes outside of her boring, unpoetic, and vaguely political filibusters. Naturally, there is some spill over of subject matter in a work with two longer "poems" (each of which have over 20 numbered sections—in both Roman numerals and standard European digits), and this gives these pieces a bit of aural repetition. Unfortunately, the words and phrases that are repeated are not interesting or particularly pleasing to hear. How many times can you say diaspora in one book?!
And lastly, I have to call into question the actual quality of ideas in this book. It's almost as if we're getting a sort of Adrienne-Rich-by-numbers here. Sure she talks about being Jewish. Being a woman. Being a lesbian. Being afraid of the government. She'll use epigraphs (sometimes two) and throw around notions of slavery, the Holocaust, America, rape . . . But the only place where she really shines is in the last section of the book—and only sometimes. At least there, Rich relates a personal experience and not just denatured political detritus; she talks about her arthritis, about aging.
I'm not happy that I didn't enjoy this collection. I am a fan of hers, and I know there is a gifted mind at work, but I'd rather stand by the things that are important in poetry to me. Without any sense of playfulness or inventiveness in the language, why am I reading? Without proposing any innovative ideas or making anything beautiful with meaning, how is this poetry? It's not.
As far as music, it comes and goes. I only give this collection two stars because of a few brief moments where Rich temporarily goes outside of her boring, unpoetic, and vaguely political filibusters. Naturally, there is some spill over of subject matter in a work with two longer "poems" (each of which have over 20 numbered sections—in both Roman numerals and standard European digits), and this gives these pieces a bit of aural repetition. Unfortunately, the words and phrases that are repeated are not interesting or particularly pleasing to hear. How many times can you say diaspora in one book?!
And lastly, I have to call into question the actual quality of ideas in this book. It's almost as if we're getting a sort of Adrienne-Rich-by-numbers here. Sure she talks about being Jewish. Being a woman. Being a lesbian. Being afraid of the government. She'll use epigraphs (sometimes two) and throw around notions of slavery, the Holocaust, America, rape . . . But the only place where she really shines is in the last section of the book—and only sometimes. At least there, Rich relates a personal experience and not just denatured political detritus; she talks about her arthritis, about aging.
I'm not happy that I didn't enjoy this collection. I am a fan of hers, and I know there is a gifted mind at work, but I'd rather stand by the things that are important in poetry to me. Without any sense of playfulness or inventiveness in the language, why am I reading? Without proposing any innovative ideas or making anything beautiful with meaning, how is this poetry? It's not.
July 6, 2016
I love Adrienne Rich. I am not the biggest fan of her earliest work, but her talent only grew as she got older. It has been a while since I read any of her writing, but from what I recall, this may be my favorite of her collections. These poems felt particularly brave, honest, and vulnerable. I appreciated it. Many may allow this to cheapen the writing, but as always, Rich is a master. Subtle, repetitive, beautiful. Sometimes I found myself wishing she would push the boundaries even more, sharpen her word choice so the lines were as intense as she intended them to be. But, overall, beautiful stuff. Right up my ally. Really, I can't get enough of Rich and look forward to reading more in the future!
December 14, 2008
It's more interesting as a means of reacting to whether poetry is very good at making political speeches. While I respect Rich for the pioneering work she has done in making people comfortable with using poetry to explore their various identity roles, I'm not so sure what the benefit is of using extensive quotes in a poem, quotes form another writer, and then showing agreement or disagreement, as Rich does in "Education of a Novelist."
August 3, 2007
Great poet who writes a lot about relationships.
From "In the Wake of Home"
"The family coil so twisted, tight and loose
anyone trying to leave
has to strafe the field
burn the premises down"
From "In the Wake of Home"
"The family coil so twisted, tight and loose
anyone trying to leave
has to strafe the field
burn the premises down"
December 27, 2010
This was disappointing. The emotional resonance of poems like "Diving into the Wreck" was lacking from this collection.
November 20, 2014
I felt my insides sizzle as the outside sat still and was cool and confrontational.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews