Jamie's Reviews > Diving Into the Wreck

I'm perpetually torn with Rich. There's a studied, formal quality to even her mid-career, furious work - and I rarely enjoy tight-wound poetry, at least on a sort of affective level. My other frustration with Rich is that she can envision striking images, but so many of her poems seem to me to be endless series of absolutely disconnected images, and not in a surrealist, avant-garde way, either. Just disjointed attempts at stating the same idea again and again, which can be tedious. The latter parts of this book, particularly "The Phenomenology of Anger" and "Meditations for a Savage Child," were the most consistent and compelling pieces. And obviously, the title poem is worth the price of admission alone. For that poem I'll always give Rich another chance.