The dream of a common language : poems, 1974-1977 / Adrienne Rich.

"Twenty-one love poems": p. 25-36.

Twenty-one Love Poems was fist published in a limited edition, designed and hand-printed

"Some of these poems originally appeared in the following periodicals: Amazon Quarterly, Chrysalis, College English, Field, Heresies, The Little Magazine, Moving Out, Ms., New Boston Review, Sinister Wisdom, 13th Moon"

I Power : Power -- Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev -- Origins and history of consciousness -- Splittings -- Hunger -- To a poet -- Cartographies of silence -- The lioness --

II Twenty-one love poems : I Wherever in this city, screens flicker -- II I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming -- III Since we're not young, weeks have to do time -- IV I come home from you through the early light of spring -- V This apartment full of books could crack open -- VI Your small hands, precisely equal to my own -- VII What kind of beast would turn its life into words -- VIII I can see myself years back at Sunion -- IX Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live -- X Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through -- XI Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes -- XII Sleeping, turning in turn like planets -- XIII The rules break like a thermometer -- XIV It was your vision of the pilot -- (The floating poem, unnumbered) -- XV If I lay on that beach with you -- XVI Across a city from you, I'm with you -- XVII No one's fated or doomed to love anyone -- XVIII Rain on the West Side Highway -- XIX Can it be growing colder when I begin -- XX That conversation we were always on the edge -- XXI The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones --

III Not somewhere else, but here : Not somewhere else, but here -- Upper Broadway -- Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff -- Nights and days --- Sibling mysteries -- A woman dead in her forties -- Mother-right -- Natural resources -- Toward the Solstice -- Transcendental etude.

"The chapter section, "Power," contains poems about noted accomplishments of individual women, that she relates to all women. "Power," discusses Marie Curie's discovery of two elements, polonium and radium., which made her powerful but eventually led to her death. The eight poems in this section comment on the need for the nature of power to be redefined, in order to include women in a way that does not destroy them. The section, "Twenty-one Love Poems," is a group of lesbian love poems that aim to present the power of love between two women and the need to change the cultural values that do not recognize this as a kind of love. The love poems comment on how women involved in lesbian relationships are alienated because their love is not recognized by the world. The relationship that the poems are about disintegrates by the end because societal and cultural forces prevented it from lasting. The poem, "XVII," mentions these forces working "within us and against us, against us and within us." The section, "Not Somewhere Else, But Here," continues to discuss female relationships, now in relation to nature. The poem, "Natural Resources," presents common elements in the lives of women, compared to the elements in nature. The poem, "Transcendental Etude," celebrates the power of women to create on a large scale from ordinary materials. These and the other eight poems in the section show the power that women have in order to convey how the nature of language should be changed, how ideologies must change, how masculine definitions of power must be redefined, to create a common language." -- From online

"Some phrases in the poem "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff" are quoted from actual diaries and letters of Paula Modersohn-Berker, as translated by Liselotte Erlanger. As yet, no English edition of the Modersohn-Becker manuscripts exists."