Adrienne Rich's [The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977] frustrates oblique approaches and defies moderate responses. Breathtakingly beautiful and moving for the most part, it is sometimes depressingly narrow and mean. Nor is there enough between to allow one to relax into qualified judgments without misrepresenting the book. Even when the good and the bad float in the same medium, they rarely dissolve into the merely interesting or the mediocre. Still, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 is a unified project, not just a collection of poems, and it is sobering to contemplate the possibility that Rich could not have accomplished the best without doing her worst.

The unity of the volume springs from what we might think of as a pair of interrelated myths that it articulates bit by bit. One of them … concerns female identity. (p. 83)

[If] being a whole woman means being able to...