Necessities of Life

The outstanding qualities of Adrienne Rich's mature work are a somber, penetrating intelligence and a swift, flashing verbal imagination. Working together, these qualities mean that the intelligence never plods and the imagination is never ungrounded in understanding. Necessities of Life, her fourth book, is an intense, compact entity. The translations from the Dutch that form its second half are not an arbitrary choice but an integral part of the whole. In recognizing and acting upon her affinity with these poems, and placing them side by side with her own new work, she further defines, for herself and for the reader, her sense of life and her poetics.