PARTISAN REVIEW
485
creatively combats. In her sixth book, then, there will be a constant
imagery of inconstancy, of breaking free, of fracturing, of shedding and
molting:
haw yau broke apen, what sheathed yau
until this mament
I knaw nathing abaut it
my ignorance of yau amazes me
naw that I watch yau
starting to' give yaurself away
to' the wind
The governing (or anarchic) emblems in this taut, overturning book are
more likely to be drawn from almost anywhere than from poetry, from
anything but verse in its decorous accorded sense, the ritual of a depar–
ture and return, a refrain which is indeed a refraining as well, a reluc–
tance to violate repetition. Rather the figures will be derived from
dreams and dedications, letters, elegies, photographs, movies: "I am
an instrument in the shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations /
into images / for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the
mind" she says in one place, and in another: "I pledged myself to
try
any instrument that came my way. Never to refuse one from conviction
of incompetence." Ridding the self, then, of what it had been, of what
it had done ("language is the map of our failures") in order to get on
with it, to make room, to make way: these poems are that way, a trail
blazed, a transformation wrought chiefly by burning. The implication
throughout is that you do not know what you are, all you know is the
ashes of what you have been; death creates you:
to' float free
up thraugh the smake of brushfires
and incineratars.
The movies (how right that word is for a poet who says "seeing
is
changing," or again, "I thought of my words as changing minds, /
hadn't my mind also to suffer changes?" ) are the major representative
form here, and the major piece in this book is an extended series of
writings called, focally, "Shooting Script" - what Adrienne Rich herself
calls a conversation of sounds melting constantly into rhythms, "a cycle
whose rhythm begins to change the meanings of words." Preoccupied by
the wreckage of urban and amatory experiment and tradition alike, this
poet abandons what she calls the rhythms "of choice, the lost methods"
for the sake, the favor of something much more likely, an explosion
of possibilities:
