Richness

There are some very powerful and deftly made poems in Rich's The Dream of a Common Language. But there's something I'm not sure about, a whiff of the woman-as-victim-martyr about the first, 'Power', about Marie Curie, who 'suffered from radiation sickness/her body bombarded for years by the element/she had purified'; and which ends like this:

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

It's not that its bad poetry (the repeated 'denying/her wounds', with its clever portmanteau of two opposed Christ-related echoes); it's that it is emotionally dodgy, and ontologically mendacious. Our wounds do not make us strong.