Muriel Rukeyser held a visionary belief in the human capacity to create social change through language. She earned an international reputation as a powerful voice against enforced silences of all kind, against the violence of war, poverty, and racism. Her eloquent poetry of witness-of the Scottsboro Nine, the Spanish Civil War, the poisoning of the Gauley Bridge laborers-split the darkness covering a shameful world. In addition to the complete texts of her twelve previously published books, this volume also features new poems discovered by the editors; Rukeyser's translations, including the first English translations of Octavio Paz's work; early work by Rukeyser not previously published in book form; and the controversial book-length poem Wake Island. An introduction by the editors traces Rukeyser's life and literary reputation and complements discerning annotations and textual notes to the poems.
About the Author :
Janet E. Kaufman is assistant professor of English at the University of Utah.
Anne F. Herzog is Dean of theSchool of Arts, Science, and Professional Studies at Springfield College. They are coeditors of "How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?": The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser.
Jan Heller Levi, is the author of a collection of poems, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, and editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader. She is working on a biography of Muriel Rukeyser.
Review :
An event to loudly celebrate—a new collected poems of Muriel Rukeyser, who opened much of the forbidden territory where poets can now move with ease. Here, for a new generation, the full range of the capacious poet who gave twentieth-century women's poetry its mottos and its most audacious exemplar, and poetry of witness and moral passion its most ardent and urgent American voice.
One of the most admired poets of the American left, Rukeyser is in the midst of a revival: this enormous collection should help keep the spotlight on her work.""POSITIVELY BRILLIANT.
Rukeyser appears more and more as an exemplary American modernist, the lyric poet of epic awareness. Her Collected Poems is a monument of the last century, a gift to the present and a hope for the future. In it one finds . . . poems of such variety, passion and compassion, indignant judgment, joy, humor and conviction that it is impossible to summarize.
The breadth , innovation, variety and daring of Muriel Rukeyser's work has always defied efforts to confine her. She was, in fact, one of the major American imaginations of the first century of world wars. " Now at last comes this scholarly, yet beautifully accessible edition of her lifework in poetry--a great gift to the 21st century.
The editors of this invaluable volume have made accessible a major American poet and a soulful humanist.""A monument of the last century, a gift to the present and hope for the future.
One of the most important poets of our time. . . . Her originality, her genius, her courage illuminate our century.
