[What is striking about The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser] is the remarkable consistency of her writing over more than forty years.

When it is said that Muriel Rukeyser was consistent, it doesn't mean that she wrote in a narrow range of forms, or that she had a single obsessive theme that dominated her work…. In fact, the reader of these Collected Poems will find an incredible vast diversity of shapes of poems, methods of organizing lines and stanzas, varying from formal rhymed poems to the freest of free verse, and as many kinds of "open forms" as might be imagined. Rukeyser is nothing if not variable, and her voice speaks in the most private of meditations and even private jottings to the most public of orations, poems that are like murals or panoramas of historic landscapes and scenes, or running newsreels, documentary dramas, agit-prop works and sheer...