In 1950, when she was 21, Miss Rich published a widely-acclaimed, brilliantly honed collection of poems. Excellent poems from her pen have appeared since in leading magazines and in a second book. The present and third book concerns the problems faced by all women, particularly those with so delicate a talent as poetry -- of sensibility confronted with everyday reality and an inferior role. Most of these poems are a search for identity, in past or present. There is still much skillful writing here and much that will be painfully familiar to women readers, but the sense of grievance, rebellion and defeat is too personal. The book as a whole is often a troubling proof in itself of Miss Rich's thesis that it is difficult to be an intellectual poet and a woman too. As she herself says, these problems are usually dealt with in prose.