Was Rukeyser dissuaded from writing novels because of the crudely macho critical response to her first draft, submitted in 1937 at the age of 24? The more I read of her poetry and non-fiction prose, the less I believe that she could be so easily cowed. For some reason though, she did set the work aside, although she continued to edit it. It was not published in her lifetime, and in fact was only published this year due to the efforts of Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Perhaps Rukeyser decided fiction was too weak a form. Her editors requested "a brief impressionistic sketch," but instead of ingratiating with pen and ink, she gave us a Picasso oil. Like many of Picasso's landscapes, this novel conveys mood better than emotion, but it exemplifies much of the courage expressed in Rukeyser's remarkable book, The Life of Poetry. The novel is beautiful and strong and stands up to re-reading.

Muriel Rukeyser is best known as an American political poet. From the 1930s through the 1970s, she wrote poems about feminism, social inequalities, Judaism, and war. As a young woman, though, she was a political activist, and traveled to Spain as a journalist to cover the People’s Olympiad, the leftist Catalonian government’s alternative to the Nazi’s Olympics in Berlin. While she was en route to Barcelona, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and she had a brief but intense affair with a young German leftist athlete. This experience served as the basis for her novel Savage Coast, which was only last year rediscovered in her archives and published for the first time. It’s a wonderful modernist novel, in which a train of foreigners is stranded in the midst of war. Rukeyser has a keen ear for dialogue, and creates a sharply satirical chorus of voices. For readers who share her political sympathies, or love her poetic voice, Savage Coast is a wonderful discovery. ( )