Diving into the Wreck was published by W.W. Norton in 1973 and won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974 — an award Rich accepted on behalf of all women, jointly with the other nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker. The collection marks Rich’s full emergence as a political poet: the formal, restrained verse of her earlier work (praised by Auden when she was twenty-one) has been replaced by an urgent, exploratory free verse that enacts the process of feminist consciousness.
The title poem is one of the defining texts of second-wave feminism: a diver descends alone to explore a shipwreck, carrying a “book of myths / in which / our names do not appear.” The dive is simultaneously literal (the physical danger of the deep), intellectual (the descent into suppressed history), and psychological (the confrontation with the self beneath social performance). At the wreck, the diver discovers that “the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.”
The collection also includes “Trying to Talk with a Man” (a couple in a desert weapons-testing ground as metaphor for marriage), “Rape” (confronting the impossibility of reporting sexual assault to male police), and “The Phenomenology of Anger.” Throughout, Rich insists that poetry is not decoration but a tool for changing consciousness.
Collecting Diving into the Wreck
First edition (W.W. Norton, New York, 1973): Cloth with dust jacket. National Book Award winner.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $50–$150
- Signed copies: $300–$800