Along with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich is one of an outstanding trinity of American women poets born circa 1930 (she was actually born in 1929, making her a few years older than the other two, whom she has long survived). This volume is a kind of overview of her career, bringing together poems from more than a dozen collections spread over almost five decades. From the start she was astonishingly accomplished and fluent, but later she underwent an emotional crisis which saw the breakdown of her marriage and her conversion to feminism, lesbianism and political activism. Arguably this has made Rich's later verse occasionally propagandistic and shrill, or too edgy with the new gender conflicts, but the choice for this volume is a highly sensitive one which also demonstrates how much she has deepened her insights and developed her own vibrant, unmistakable timbre of voice.