Amends Study Guide

"Amends" is a poem by the lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Written in 1995, it was published fairly late in her career, in the collection Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995. The book responds to an American democracy Rich perceived as in danger, and weaves together beauty and violence into a poetic vision of the world born of a highly personal politics. "Amends" fits into this project by combining an account of the beauty of a moonlit night with a description of the ugliness and injustice of modern industrial agriculture. The poem rejects an environmental framework in which humans are the perpetrators and "nature" is the victim by instead emphasizing that human beings suffer at the hands of the same system that destroys the natural world.