A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far was published by W.W. Norton in 1981. The title (from Rich’s own poem “Integrity”) names the quality she considers essential for sustained feminist commitment: not the spectacular courage of the single rebellious act but the “wild patience” required to maintain resistance across years and decades against a culture designed to absorb, deflect, and exhaust dissent.
The collection continues the archaeological project of The Dream of a Common Language: recovering women’s histories from the silence imposed on them. Major poems include “The Spirit of Place” (on Emily Dickinson’s Amherst), “Frame” (on a woman falsely convicted), “Turning the Wheel” (a sequence set in the American Southwest), and “For Ethel Rosenberg” (examining a woman defined and destroyed by her relationship to political power).
Rich’s method in this collection is increasingly historical: she researches women’s lives — quilters, herbalists, political prisoners, poets — and writes them back into visibility. The poems argue that women’s history is not a supplement to “real” history but an alternative tradition with its own continuity, its own methods of preservation (quilts, recipes, letters, oral traditions), and its own forms of resistance.
Collecting A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far
First edition (W.W. Norton, New York, 1981): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40