Midnight Salvage. - book review

Progressive, The, July, 1999 by Rafael Campo

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 celestial dialogue.

The book's crowning achievement is another long poem, "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes." Here, Rich invokes the poet Muriel Rukeyser:

   After one stroke she looks at the river
   remembers her name--Muriel

   writes it in her breath
   on the big windowpane

   never again perhaps
   to walk in the city freely

   but here is her landscape this old
   industrial building converted

   for artists
   her river The Lordly Hudson

   Paul named it which has no peer
   in Europe or the East

   her mind on that water widening

In these lines, we glimpse Rich's (and Rukeyser's) vision of a world where art--pure product of the crafter's hands--takes ironic precedence over industry and its voracious machines. The nearly vanishing nature of the poet's art is distilled to a name written in breath on a windowpane. The simple beauty of Rukeyser's own description of her beloved riverscape is put to use as metaphor for consciousness: "her mind on that water widening."

The poignancy of Rukeyser's debilitating illness is only heightened by Rich's amazing journey, which proceeds through a dark, urban dreamworld, where she encounters the spirits of two other poetmuses, Hart Crane and Julia de Burgos.

Always mindful of her difficult place in this imperfect world, yet courageous enough (as they were) to envision its eventual healing, Rich is the worthy successor to these poets. In honoring them, and in fashioning her own astonishing poems, she teaches us all humility.

Poet and essayist Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center in Boston. He is the author of "The Other Man Was Me" (Arte Publico Press, 1994), "What the Body Told" (Duke University Press, 1996), "The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire" (W.W. Norton, 1997), and "Diva" (Duke, forthcoming in October).3