The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

May 30, 2005
One of the most admired poets of the American left, Rukeyser (1914–1980) is in the midst of a revival: this enormous collection should help keep the spotlight on her work. Rukeyser's early poems (1935's Theory of Flight
, 1938's U.S. 1
) melded modernist surfaces with outspoken Popular Front politics. The best known (and best) of her many sequences, "The Book of the Dead" (1938), chronicles corporate negligence at a West Virginia construction project: "Almost as soon as work was begun in the tunnel/ men began to die among dry drills." As her star waned after the Second World War, she continued to enunciate bold hopes: "Let me tell you what I have known all along," she asked in 1949: "meaning of poetry and personal love,/ a world of peace and freedom." Later odes and longer poems praised Rukeyser's heroes, among them Kathe Kollwitz, Herman Melville, the Jewish folk-hero Rabbi Akiba, the New England entrepreneur Timothy Dexter and the physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs. Though the would-be mythic poems she produced in the 1950s are now hard to read, her decade of work returned to her fiery strengths; drawing her forms, at times, from tribal chants, her energies from protest movements, Rukeyser hoped to "recognize at the other edge of ocean/ a new kind of man a new kind of woman."

April 15, 2005
Coeditors of ""How Shall We Teach Each " "Other of the Poet?": The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser", Kaufman (English, Univ. of Utah) and Herzog (English, West Chester Univ.) present a finely notated scholarly anthology of a major poet of the 20th century. Rukeyser herself edited the original edition (1978) and wrote in the preface, "might it not be that poetry and indeed all speech are a translation? This translation, this music, speaks to our silence. It in my childhood did, and ever since, I hope these may speak to yours, as my silence goes on speaking." This 2005 edition includes a poem that Rukeyser omitted from the 1978 edition: the long poem "Wake Island". That it can be found here signals the new volume's scholarly value, for the poem glorifies war and could easily misrepresent Rukeyser to contemporary general readers. Scholars, however, will appreciate the different moment in 1942 and the burden that Rukeyser was suggesting the American poet had to bear at that time. While Rukeyser's edition remains highly valuable, this new edition will add meaningfully to academic collections. Recommended for large academic collections. -Heidi Arnold, formerly with the American Theological Lib. Assn., Vestal, NY

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2005
Rukeyser (1916-80) was as committed to seeking justice as she was to writing poetry, and she believed in poetry as a transformational force. She wrote about war, the dire fate of silica miners in West Virginia, the tyranny of class and racism, and the nature and significance of womanhood from such a strikingly independent viewpoint that both the Left and the Right found her controversial. Rukeyser's supple, often Whitmanesque, gracefully outspoken poems possess a planed-smooth dignity, a drive toward testimony and story, a feel for science, a love of art, and a profound sense of connection with humankind. By gathering together 12 previously published books, beginning with " Theory of Flight" (1935) and ending with " The Gates "(1976), as well as retrieving translations and juvenilia, the editors of this invaluable volume have made accessible a major American poet and a soulful humanist. "Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me," Rukeyser writes, thus stating the key to her empathy and her striking gift for erasing the line between the personal and the political.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)