SOURCE: "Poetic Anger," in The New York Times Book Review, April 21, 1996, pp. 32-3.

In the review below, Donoghue faults the themes and tone of Dark Fields of the Republic, claiming that "each of the poems is interesting mainly because [Rich wrote it."]

Adrienne Rich publishes a new volume of her poetry every three or four years and, less frequently, books of prose on major concerns, especially themes ad feminam. Her readers treasure these books, I imagine, as a series of journals or notebooks, leaflets—evidence of Ms. Rich's desiring, thinking and feeling, her distinctive ways of being alive. As she wrote in The Dream of a Common Language, "The story of our lives becomes our lives."

It hardly matters, then, except to the history of American poetry, that few of her new poems achieve the autonomy of a work of art, floating free of their autobiographical contexts. Each...