A dark mirror: one that reflects obscurity, full of shadows, a magic mirror in a particular way…. A dark mirror when you look into it may show you something altogether other, and darker, than the familiar daylight reflection you looked for.

Muriel Rukeyser, to me, is like this: beyond the apparent, some other appearance, almost an apparition. (p. 51)

In a long series of poems and clusters of poems such as we have [in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rykeyser], one looks especially for recurring themes, and intimations of method. It has become customary, almost obligatory, to use the term "development" in such an inquiry, with its attendant context of "evolution." Yet what is most fascinating in truly directed works and lives is how much they begin as they mean to go on, advancing not so much by development as by repeated metamorphosis of a vision and a self...