a wild patience has taken me this far poem

As a precocious 21-year-old, she was famously patronised by WH Auden, who would claim that the tidy, metrical poems of her first volume, A Change of World (1951), were 'neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them'. Over a distinguished 50-year career, Adrienne Rich has explored history, gender and ideology with tenacity and courage. Unlike many poets, who are often not skilled orators, she reads dazzlingly, excavating the depths and finding intricate threads of meaning running through each image.įrom 'Power', her 1974 poem about Marie Curie, she gives a chilling edge to the concluding line: 'Her wounds came from the same source as her power.' However, most startling is her rendition of 'Diving into the Wreck', a landmark poem which not only marked a leap forward in American poetry, but also mapped out a watershed in Rich's own transformation from a poet of distinction into a poet fully aware of her own creative destiny as a lesbian and feminist:

Her voice couldn't be more of a contrast: still tinged with the southern drawl of her native Baltimore, the cadences are sharp and resonant as they project her imagery and symbolism. Behind the sound-proof glass that separates the inner chamber from the banks of dials and diodes, she looks small and frail. In a cramped studio in Shepherd's Bush, Adrienne Rich is recording some of her work for the new Poetry Archive, a project that aims to make recordings of major poets available via the internet.

A wild patience has taken me this far poem