Rebecca's Reviews > Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972

I don’t think I understood or appreciated this as much as I wanted to. I sensed a profundity under the surface that escaped my grasp. My favorite individual poem was the multi-part “Meditations for a Savage Child,” inspired by the Wild Boy of Aveyron. Though written 45 years ago, the poems of feminist outrage seem just as relevant today: “my visionary anger cleansing my sight / and the detailed perceptions of mercy / flowering from that anger.” An example is “Rape,” where she shows how sexual assault is thrown back on the victims: “You have to confess / to him, you are guilty of the crime / of having been forced.”

This felt particularly relevant just after the election: “Here in the matrix of need and anger, the / disproof of what we thought possible / failures of medication / doubts of another’s existence / —tell it over and over, the words / get thick with unmeaning— / yet never have we been closer to the truth / of the lies we were living” (from “When We Dead Awaken”)