One of the most admired poets of the American left, Rukeyser (1914–1980) is in the midst of a revival: this enormous collection should help keep the spotlight on her work. Rukeyser's early poems (1935's Theory of Flight
, 1938's U.S. 1
) melded modernist surfaces with outspoken Popular Front politics. The best known (and best) of her many sequences, "The Book of the Dead" (1938), chronicles corporate negligence at a West Virginia construction project: "Almost as soon as work was begun in the tunnel/ men began to die among dry drills." As her star waned after the Second World War, she continued to enunciate bold hopes: "Let me tell you what I have known all along," she asked in 1949: "meaning of poetry and personal love,/ a world of peace and freedom." Later odes and longer poems praised Rukeyser's heroes, among them Kathe Kollwitz, Herman Melville, the Jewish folk-hero Rabbi Akiba, the New England entrepreneur Timothy Dexter and the physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs. Though the would-be mythic poems she produced in the 1950s are now hard to read, her decade of work returned to her fiery strengths; drawing her forms, at times, from tribal chants, her energies from protest movements, Rukeyser hoped to "recognize at the other edge of ocean/ a new kind of man a new kind of woman." (June)
