The Voice of the Poet: Adrienne Rich by Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Cecile Rich (Read by)

Product Details

Synopsis

THE VOICE OF THE POET

A remarkable series of audiobooks, featuring distinguished twentieth-century American poets reading from their own work. A first in audiobook publishing--a series that uses the written word to enhance the listening experience--poetry to be read as well as heard. Each audiobook includes rare archival recordings and a book with the text of the poetry, a bibliograohy, and commentary by J. D. McClatchy, the poet and critic, who is the editor of The Yale Review.

"Hearing poetry spoken by the poet is always a unique illumination. This series opens our ears to some of the most passionate utterances and enthralling performances ever recorded."--Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner, Poetry

"There has been a great need for a well-edited audio series for poetry, with high literary and technical quality. J. D. McClatchy has filled this need with great style."--Robert Pinsky

School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up-This entry in the Voice of the Poet series presents archival recordings of Adrienne Rich reading her own poems, which are arranged chronologically. Rich's body of work is accessible to high school students, many of whom will find that her words about friendship, political intolerance in the U.S., and feminism resonate at a personal as well as a literary level. The accompanying booklet includes an introductory essay about Rich's life, authored by series editor J. D. McClatchey, followed by a listing of the recorded poems in the order they play. While the splicing of recording sessions is nicely done, it is clear to listeners that Rich's voice ages. This makes the poet all the more immediate and the poems all the more compelling. Excellent for use in classrooms as well as a necessary purchase for school and public libraries.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Biography

Adirenne Rich is a poet of rare power and commitment. Born in 1929, she was still a student at Radcliff when her first book of poems was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series in 1951. Over the next two decades her ambitions deepened as she shaped her peoms into instruments of analysis and discovery. Her involvement in the political movements of the late 1960s eventually led her to a radical feminism, which is both an argument with the self and the effort, personal and poetic, to recover the power prior to patriarchy and its political oppressions. Whether writing about the fate of women in history or the drama of women loving women, she sees in her poems both the means of change and the "dream of the common language." She has published seventeen volumes of poetry, each of them driven, as she has said, by "a belief in art, not as a commodity, not as a luxury, not as a suspect activity, but as a precious resource to be made available to all."