... allows us to meet this prickly poet fresh and entire. It’s the first proper biography of her, and there’s a lot to unpack. This is a good story well-told ... If Holladay’s solid biography has a weak spot, it’s that she makes it difficult for anyone to criticize Rich’s work, for any reason whatsoever, and not be thought complicit in the grinding machinery of misogyny ... Holladay is a sensitive reader of Rich’s poetry. She also explicates Rich’s windswept moods.
Which of these women was the real Rich? The dutiful daughter, the star undergrad, the excellent cook? Or the political poet who used every platform she had—and she had many—to criticize violence in all its forms? This is the question that the scholar and writer Hilary Holladay poses in The Power of Adrienne Rich, the first biography of the poet and, one hopes, not the last. 'Who was she? Who was she really?' Holladay asks near the end of the book. Her question recalls a claim she makes in the preface, where she argues that Rich never felt she had a 'definitive identity,' and that 'the absence of a fully knowable self'—a 'wound,' in Holladay’s words—spurred her on, to both self-discovery and creative success. According to Holladay, the only secure identity Rich ever found was in her art. 'That is who and what she is,' Holladay concludes.
Now comes Hilary Holladay’s taut, engaging The Power of Adrienne Rich, which plumbs the career of one of our more complex writers and activists, who, early on, tracked along the same trajectory as Plath and Sexton, but then rocketed into an orbit that blended poetics with politics in dazzling, uncompromising fashion ... The poet’s swerve toward enjambment and erasure of punctuation were political acts; and as politics became Rich’s lodestar, so did her compulsive need to discover herself: 'It was always the Jew in her, even before the woman, the lesbian … who yearned and needed to be heard and seen. … She had made a Talmud of her life, the multiple meanings of which demanded endless study, debate, and interpretation.' The Power of Adrienne Rich announces its thesis in its title, but Holladay is a fair-minded and meticulous critic of the poet’s life and art. This elegant, assured biography underscores Rich’s essential place in our literary pantheon.
... capacious, generous ... Holladay devotes perhaps too many pages to Rich’s star turn at the 1974 National Book Awards, where she, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker together accepted her prize on behalf of 'all the women.' But the fame was real: For decades, her readings filled auditoriums ... Rich’s first lesbian partners included the activist poet June Jordan and Susan Sontag. A light sense of unaddressed controversies, of material withheld, lingers over Holladay’s treatment of those years. Yet she resolves the greatest mystery in Rich’s career, the identity of the lover in Twenty-One Love Poems ... Holladay asserts, a bit defensively, that the poet was no dogmatic separatist.
... highly readable ... a largely admiring portrait of a protean, prodigiously gifted woman that stops short of hagiography ... One of the great virtues of Holladay’s narrative is how skillfully it integrates jargon-free textual analysis of the poetry and uses it to trace Rich’s personal and political metamorphoses. While Rich is most familiar as the lesbian feminist of the 1970s, Holladay also makes the case for her later political poetry and her efforts to wrestle with her Jewish identity, ambivalently bequeathed to her by her father.
... Hilary Holladay’s capacious new biography of Rich...encapsulates the mixed-up and messy, personal and political shape and texture of Adrienne Rich’s life. It shows, too, how willingly she often looked back later on choices she’d made with regret ... That Holladay uses...Rich’s own words to define the terms of the biography—is the book’s great strength. Yet, if it’s the role of the artist to name and contain the sensations of life, it is the job of the biographer to show us the mess and murk of the artist’s life that the work does not or cannot hold. What I yearned for most in the reading was a more rigorous attempt to push past the language Rich has already offered into the spaces that her own words had not yet shown: the morning after those nights up late after the kids were in bed when Rich drank cold glasses of straight vodka and smoked cigarettes, the artist-mother long after she’d stopped 'sleepwalking,' not as an idea to which we might all aspire but as a tired, worn-out reality.
In The Power of Adrienne Rich, the first biography of the poet, Hilary Holladay follows Rich’s script, portraying her as conventional, even antifeminist, until the late 1960s when everything fell into place. I think this is too easy, too neat for such a driven and many-sided writer ... Holladay doesn’t have access to the inner workings of Adrienne’s two long relationships, the first with Conrad, the second with the younger writer Michelle Cliff ... Holladay is a good source for gossip and a fine storyteller, but can’t give her readers the pleasures of Adrienne’s voice: the poet sealed her intimate papers until 2050 and left instructions to friends and family not to work with biographers.
Hilary Holladay’s biography—the first—is pleasingly economical, condensing more than eight decades into four hundred pages. It is admiring and sympathetic, but occasionally cocks an eyebrow ... Holladay reveals the extent to which actual, first-hand suffering also informed Rich’s aesthetics ... one doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort—unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal. Yet Holladay reveals the extent to which actual, first-hand suffering also informed Rich’s aesthetics[.]
A sense of disconnection and a lack of synchronicity with the rhythms of the day pervade this novel, which opens when 11-year-old Jack wakes in the night to discover his 5-year-old sister Annabel has gone sleepwalking outside, and he decides to track her down ... Nights When Nothing Happened builds from a somnambulant beginning to a dramatic conclusion as the Chengs’ choices, based on what they think will be safest for the kids, actually endanger them. Even in carefully planned, hermetically sealed Plano, there’s no controlling the cascade of events that ensue when a wild child is unleashed in a community that does not understand her family.
... comprehensive and richly told ... Synthesizing a treasure trove of Rich’s letters, journals, testimonials, and published writings to chronicle a complicated and impactful life, Holladay takes readers through Rich’s unorthodox and at times turbulent upbringing, her early years of professional and academic success at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, her frustrations as a mother of three young sons with a demanding family life, and her later years as a prominent feminist activist and writer in New York and California. Holladay shows Rich’s relevance today through mining meaning from her poems, which reflect both an earlier time as well as our current political moment, and help to tell the story of her life, which Holladay interprets through events happening to the poet at the time she was writing certain poems ... Exceptionally well-researched and detailed, this is a definitive portrait of Rich that will be welcomed by aspiring writers and poets, Rich scholars, and devotees of 20th-century American poetry.
