Product Description

This definitive collection showcases thirty years of work by one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century, bringing together verse that originally appeared in eight acclaimed books of poetry ranging from Hello: A Journal (1978) to Life & Death (1998) and If I were writing this (2003). Robert Creeley, who was involved with the publication of this volume before his death in 2005, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment--the new postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005 will stand together with The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2000 as essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American poetry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #864356 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 677 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Creeley, who died last year at nearly 80, was one of the great poets of the American 20th century. This collection brings together the books from the second half of his career, forming a companion to a volume covering 1945-1975. This book doesn't contain Creeley's breakout volume, For Love (1962), but it does have some magnificent poetry. There are elegiac poems throughout-the first poem from Later (1979), "Myself," begins "What, younger, felt/ was possible, now knows/ is not." There are nine books collected here in all, plus four previously unpublished poems. In a short note, Creeley's wife Penelope mentions that they had discussed his writing a preface for this book: "He had thought about what he wanted to say: 'These are my poems. I love them and stand by them.'" Readers will do the same over the course of the 21st century.
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Review
"Groundbreaking Poet Robert Creeley helped transform postwar American poetry by making it more conversational and emotionally direct." - Dinitia Smith, New York Times "[A] Black Mountain poet fired by an elemental energy.... Each work is a minutely detailed pressure point set into motion." - Michael Hrebeniak, The Guardian "Robert Creeley, one of the most significant American poets of our time, [was] a poet for whom pretentiousness was anathema. For Creeley, poetry was like music, and he never wasted a note." - Jeff Miers, The Buffalo News "Creeley was, to my mind, easily the finest poet of my parents' generation & truly the dean of American poets at least from the death of Williams until his own." - Ron Silliman, author of Under Albany"

From the Inside Flap
"The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound."--William Carlos Williams

"It is a study, how Creeley lands syntax down the alley, and his vocabulary-pure English-to hit meters and rhymes all of which are spares and strikes."--Charles Olson

"Robert Creeley has created a noble body of poetry that extends the work of his predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson, and provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness."--Allen Ginsberg

"His succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond." --John Ashbery

"Robert Creeley was one of the great giants of 20th Century American poetry. This collection is his monument." --Paul Auster

"American poetry is unimaginable and, happily, unknowable without Creeley."--Andrei Codrescu, author of it was today: new poems

"Creeley is a touchstone for me-a measure of what poetry is. He is a genius of the sensorium as Kerouac was and a master of the ear as is Miles Davis. He is a carver in space like Van Gogh."--Michael McClure

"There is no poetry more vivid, immediate, or telling than Robert Creeley's. His Collected Poems extends the achievement of Dickinson, Whitman, and Williams into postwar America. Creeley's excavation of particular words, images, and sentiments resonate beyond the pages of this book into the fabric of everyday life. This is American invention at its best, as necessary as the air we breathe and the ground we walk on."--Charles Bernstein

"'It isn't what a poet says that counts as a work of art,' William Carlos Williams once wrote, 'it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.' I can't think of another contemporary poet whose acute sensitivity to the particular event of making (and in poetry making includes breaking) each written line is as consummately fine-tuned as Robert Creeley's."--Susan Howe

"He was the main support in the old house of poetry--the main beam."--C.D. Wright, Brown University alumni newsletter

"There is no poet like Creeley. His multiple subjectivities and magic syllables have kept us curious and honest. Never a false step, never a less than tender heart for the sound, and the brilliant cognitive, often fierce power therein. What a glorious long life in writing. These late poems keep the brilliant tempo. We are very lucky he is still so much among us."--Anne Waldman

"Robert Creeley transformed the momentary, spontaneous music of being alive into a profoundly enduring American art: brilliant, necessary, impeccably scored. He made it new for always."--Peter Gizzi