Midnight Salvage.

• Author: Campo, Rafael

Midnight Salvage by Adrienne Rich W.W. Norton. 75 pages. $22.00.

Among America's great poets, Adrienne Rich stands out as particularly exemplary, and for more than one reason. She continually questions and reinvents her authority even as she cleaves to a radical politics of resistance. Her own poetry is stunning in its originality, yet she is capable of inhabiting the imaginations of other writers and artists. She defends the inviolate dignity of each human being, yet acknowledges our interconnectedness. Rich's poetry is an awe-inspiring work in progress, unafraid of the kind of conflict that engenders truth.

Central to Rich's latest book, Midnight Salvage, is the quest for personal happiness--and the problem of defining "happiness"--in an American society that continues to exploit its most defenseless citizens, and in the face of a larger world where contempt for human rights leads to nightmare. Her solution has as much to do with empathy as it does with revolution.

Take the scene Rich witnesses in the poem "Shattered Head":

a bloodshot mind finding itself unspeakable What is the last thought? Now I will let you know? or, Now I know? (porridge of skull splinters, brain tissue mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid) Shattered head on the breast of a wooded hill laid down there endlessly so For Rich, human suffering is necessarily poetry's subject. In this poem, her language demonstrates--as it disintegrates on the page--that only poetry can apprehend truth in such painful confrontations. She dissects the anatomy of consciousness and voice, laying bare the violence yet managing to preserve a sense of beauty in the intricate, bloody mess that was once a thinking being.

Her words and images ricochet off one another, as if the bullets and grenades of the killing fields were flying around us. When we are struck by her precision, we, too, feel wounded.

If in some poems Rich seems to stumble upon the origins of perception and language, in others she joins the voices of her intellectual forebears in meditations that stretch across time, genre, and geography. Only Rich could produce the difficult synthesis of "A Long Conversation," where Marx and Guevara and Wittgenstein and Coleridge and Enzensberger clash in a...