BOOKS
two kinds of reaching ... one based on the document, the evidence
itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex,
dream, the pans of life in which we dive deep and sometimes-with
strength of expression and skill and luck-reach that place where
things are shared and we all recognize the secrets.
637
That alternating quest characterizes the tensions between moral
passion and personal concern that enliven all of her poems. Her work
is documentary in the sense that it deals with half a century of national
issues and world affairs: the Tennessee Valley Authority; the Gauley
Bridge and industrial silicosis; the fall of Barcelona; World War II;
Korea; Vietnam; and, in
The Gates
(1976), the poet's own journey to
plead for the freedom of Kim Chi Ha, the Korean writer condemned to
death for asserting his political beliefs. Her "documents" portray, as in
"The Book of the Dead"
(U.S.
1, 1938), the lives and manners of people
affected by disaster, hearing their speech accurately, probing their
intimate griefs.
In her earlier work she depicts American disasters with a flatness
that approximates archival records. Occasionally she employs a
tangled, associative tone, as in the "E legies" of
A Turning Wind
(\ 939), when exp loring the connection between private despair and the
world's misery, or expressing her dismay at human suffering, as in
"Who in One Lifetime" (194 1). Antithetical to the poems that deal
with public issues are the personal lyrics, such as "Song" (1944), and
"Song, the Brain-Coral" (\939). The second poem begins:
Lie still, be sti ll , love, be thou not shaken,
it is for me to be shaken,
to bring tokens.
Among the yellow light in the hot gardens,
the thinned green light in the evening gardens,
I speak of gladness.
The importance of Muriel Rukeyser's poetry, though, is not
defined by her subject matter. Nor is it, as some critics have said, in her
"feminine voice." It is in the struggle to preserve a vision of human
integration in a life of fragmentation: Rukeyser affirms the splendor of
all forms of life, as in "St. Roach" (1976), for example, where the
speaker examines an insect:
Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were stanled, you ran, you fled away
