The themes of this book are the poetics of violence and the poetics of love. Its impulse is the deepening of recognitions through language, in a time of ignorance and mutilation.
Miss Rich has written: "For a poet...there is this primary labor with words. But I have the notion that how you live your life has something to do with it-that morality, for a poet, is a refusal of blinders, of traditional consolations, a courage to be alone, or wounded....A willingness to step out into the fog, to take paths which may lead nowhere. Certainty, predictability, are the first supports that have to go. I see the poetry of things as standing in resistance to brute mechanistic force, the charge of the rhinoceros with its head down. To discover-literally-this poetry and re-create it in language is a poet's essential action."
- ISBN10 0701118555
- ISBN13 9780701118556
- Publish Date 6 April 1972 (first published 17 March 1969)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 October 2003
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Chatto & Windus
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 72
- Language English