An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 by Adrienne RichW.W. Norton & Company, 1991

I think Adrienne Rich was the first poet I really enjoyed reading: I read “Diving into the Wreck” in a high school English class, then bought The Fact of a Doorframe later in high school and read and re-read my way through that book in late high school and early college. I haven’t read so much by her lately, but I was browsing my shelves trying to decide what to read next on a delicious spring-like evening (windows open, the smell of woodsmoke wafting in from somewhere) and this one caught my eye.

One of the later poems in this book includes a phrase from Simone Weil, and the full sentence the phrase comes from is given in the Notes: “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’” The idea of answering or imagining or feeling one’s way into that what are you going through? is a central idea of this slim volume of Rich’s poems from the late 1980s and early 1990s: it’s there from the very start of the very first poem and keeps coming up. The first poem, the title poem, is probably my favorite; it and the other long poem of this book (“Eastern War Time”) are to me the most compelling because there’s room in them for a broadness of experience and/or time, a sense of both the big picture/history (industrial agriculture, the Holocaust) and the personal, and also room for both the horrors and loveliness of the world:

(from the first section of “An Atlas of the Difficult World”):

I don’t want to know
wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials
and so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly
over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in
another season, light and music still pouring over
our fissured, cracked terrain. (4)

Some early favorite lines, from the same section of the same poem:

voice of the freeway, night after night, metal streaming downcoast
past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires
THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes
dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand (3)

I like, too, how Rich writes about nature, wind and weather and apple trees and succulents, the different feel of different places (a cabin or a brook in Vermont, the California coast).