Rich’s poems, staged within her investigating mind’s planetarium, bundle together imagistic enigmas, and then pierce the fog with plain-spoken moments of reckoning, her syllables paced, lucent, stentorian: “But there come times — perhaps this is one of them — / when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die.” The unconscious didn’t seem to play much part in her work; instead, she chose daylight. To change the world, a poem needs to state its points with blistering simplicity. See the heartbreaking end of “A Woman Dead in Her Forties”: “the body tells the truth in its rush of cells / . . . I would have touched my fingers / to where your breasts had been / but we never did such things.” This avowal may be intimate, but she pitches her voice to echo in the amphitheater. No gesture, in her carefully wrought poems, ever seemed accidental; and yet, starting in the mid-1950s, she dated each poem, to mark it as a revocable way station.

Rich performed her ethical mission by writing lines sensitive to the pulsations and textures of material fact: animal, plant, human, stone, water, planet. Her politics, not abstract, took place in blood vessels. Precarious ecologies stirred her sympathies. Rich was a natural historian with an ear for the music that politics makes in the body. Listen to her long vowels and keen consonants; listen to the leitmotif of pain. Note the physiologies of words like “crevice” and “gobbets,” “shearing” and “vetch,” “scours” and “debridements,” “pelt” and “cumbrous,” “juts” and “bleak glare aching,” “rootsuck” and “glare-lit,” “crenellated” and “burdock,” “pleated” and “mazed,” “grief-tranced hand” and “the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch.” Rich concentrated her music; necessary, dubious, it incarnated her earliest hopes.

Listening to Rich’s vowels and consonants, we hear her ethics. Racism and patriarchy have pillaged a natural world she elegizes; amid mourning, she intones (in a voice disbursing consolation) such lancing phrases as “the lake’s light-blistered blue,” “the soaked wick quietly / drinking,” “striated iris stand in a jar.” Nor forget “crimson stems veining upward” or “the dry darkbrown lace of seaweed.” Observe the “bridgelit shawls” and the “sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air.” Pay homage to “firegreen yucca under fire-ribbed clouds / blue-green agave grown huge in flower” and the spectacle of “bloodred bract from spiked stem / tossing on the ocean.” Learn from a rainbow “arching her lusters over rut and stubble.”

Join the perverse visionaries whom Rich salutes in “Natural Resources”:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those

who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,

reconstitute the world.

Disavowed theatrics accord Rich a tone of oracular power.

In public readings, Rich recited her own poems with indelibly sonorous clarity. No listener could fail to be haunted by her deliberate voice, with its trace of a Southern (Baltimorean?) accent. A voice at the podium and a voice on the page are not the same thing; but the grain of her voice can unlock her poetry’s sometimes Cartesian heart. Listen to Rich hearing herself — testing herself, investigating her own capacities — in such phrases as “water-drop in tilted catchment” or “gentleness swabs the crusted stump.” Precisely calibrated poetic speech is a poultice.

In “Storm Warnings,” the first poem in her first book (“A Change of World”), published when she was 21 years old and now reissued alongside the majestic “Collected Poems” (which comes with a sensitive introduction by Claudia Rankine), Rich describes herself as a clairvoyant “knowing better than the instrument / what winds are walking overhead.” She became the instrument who could register the tempest’s oncoming force; storm — as planetary crisis, as political revolution, as sensual upsurge — was her vocation. If you have never read Rich, begin with “Storm Warnings.” Read it aloud. Try to imagine a country where a poet like Rich is the lauded anchor a populace could trust, in its quest for policies more solid than superstitions.