"The Will to Change is an extraordinary book of poems...It has the urgency of a prisoner's journal: patient, laconic, eloquent, as if determined thoughts were set down in stolen moments." ―David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review "The Will to Change must be read whole: for its tough distrust of completion and for its cool declaratives which fix us with a stare more unsettling than the most hysterical questions...It includes moments when poverty and heroism explode grammer with their own dignified unsyntactical demands...The poems are about departures, about the pain of breaking away from lovers and from an old sense of self. They discover the point where loneliness and politics touch, where the exercise of the radical courage takes its inevitable toll."―David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review

For thirty years, Rich's poetry has revealed the individual personal life—sexualities, loves, damages, struggles—as inseparable from a wider social condition, a world with others, in which the empowering of the disempowered is increasingly the source of human hope. Now her mature vision engages with the power of time itself: memory and its contradictions, the ebb and flow between parents and children, the deaths we all face sooner or later, the meaning of human responsibility in all this. "Letters in the Family," for example, is written in the voices of three women—from the Spanish Civil War, from a Jewish rescue mission behind Nazi lines, and from present-day Southern Africa. Time's Power shows Rich writing with unprecedented range, complexity, and authority.

The themes of this book are the poetics of violence and the poetics of love. Its impulse is the deepening of recognitions through language, in a time of ignorance and mutilation. Miss Rich has written: "For a poet...there is this primary labor with words. But I have the notion that how you live your life has something to do with it—that morality, for a poet, is a refusal of blinders, of traditional consolations, a courage to be alone, or wounded....A willingness to step out into the fog, to take paths which may lead nowhere. Certainty, predictability, are the first supports that have to go. I see the poetry of things as standing in resistance to brute mechanistic force, the charge of the rhinoceros with its head down. To discover—literally—this poetry and re-create it in language is a poet's essential action."