Despite Rich's current commitment to a poetry of energetically willed process which would generate an irresistible forward momentum, breaking through the old dilemmas in a "succession of brief, amazing movements / each one making possible the next" … one is struck in rereading the volumes [of her poetry by] how much of the most significant movement in her poems is neither directly forward nor equivocal in its consequences. Instead, the critical discoveries are made when the poet insists, as she first did in a poem in A Change of World, on "stepping backward." Perhaps too much is being made these days of Rich as prophet, with too many approving critics reviewing her career eager to uncover only embryonic stirrings of her present feminist identity. (p. 142)

Even before feminism and Rich discovered each other, many of the readers of her seven volumes felt she was articulating with uncanny accuracy a familiar...