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Pathos and Promise

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS and Other Poems; Adrienne Ceclle Rich; Harper and Brothers, 1955; 119 pp.; $2.75.

But despite the constant passing of things, ("... a man's whole life/Most rightly could be written, like his own,/ In terms of places he was forced to leave ..."), there is a final affirmation, an almost defiant optimism, in Miss Rich's work. In the fallibility and passion of human behavior she seems to find its whole beauty. "Be rich as you are human," her hermit cries.

In some of her quiet narratives of relationship between people, the poet reaches a colloquial ease that can hardly avoid comparison to Robert Frost, as in:

"Maybe it was the weather lost us Eden,"

I said, but faltering, and the words went by ...

And that was all. He brought me to the door ...

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and:

The night of Joel's death I slept alone

In this same room. A neighbor said she'd stay,

Thinking the dead man lying down below

Might keep the living from rest ...

And as in Frost's case, it is this gentle at-homeness with language that almost makes us overlook Miss Rich's skill in its use. Like him, too, she knows well the failures of life and of language, but sees in them the hope of final dignity and beauty:

What's left us in this violent spectacle

But kisses on the mouth, or works of will--

The imagination's form so sternly wrought,

The flashes of the brain so boldly penned

That when the sunset gutters to its end

The world's last thought will be our flaring thought?

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