SOURCE: "Brightening the Landscape," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 25, 1996, p. 5.

In the following glowing review of Dark Fields of the Republic, St. John admires Rich's poetic style for its blending of personal details with broad public concerns.

During the past 40 years as a poet, essayist and political activist, Adrienne Rich has stood as a reminder of what an engaged political life coupled with a supreme poetic gift can offer to a starved culture. Given the bleak landscape of what seems to be our national political and social agenda, Rich's new collection of poems takes on a prescient resonance.

It would be hard to overstate Rich's influence as a cultural presence. There is no one whose poetry has spoken more eloquently for the oppressed and marginalized in America, no one who has more compassionately charted the course of individual human suffering across the horrifying and impersonal graph...