Product Description

This new, compact Selected Poems offers for the first time a balanced survey of Robert Creeley's entire sixty years of poetic accomplishment. It showcases the works that made him one of the most beloved and significant writers of the past century while inviting a new recognition of his enduring commitments, fluency, and power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #599596 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 360 pages

From Booklist
A true iconoclast, Creeley was one of the last defending stalwarts of outsider poets, from the Black Mountain School to the beats, the deep imagists, the language poets, and even the performance poets. Editor Friedlander has done a masterful job assembling the best of 50 years of poetry. “Particularity, commonality, language, and person: these are the principal terms of Robert Creeley’s art, a sixty-year inquiry into the nature of experience,” writes Friedlander in his comprehensive introduction, which includes reproductions of handwritten poetry drafts, original versions of typed poems, art, and family pictures. The poems, many of which smack of a William Carlos Williams’ influence, are brief, emotionally charged, and lyrical, using ordinary language in short, breathy lines. Creeley’s poetry comprises distilled revelation, with his voice and personal experience present throughout. This well-chosen selected collection is full of subtle, almost hesitant oppositional poems, rather than confessional narratives, adding up to a distinguished posthumous release that will keep Creeley’s necessary poetry very much alive. --Mark Eleveld

From the Inside Flap
"Here is Creeley at his skillfully selected best: full of the melodies of plain speech, concise yet resonant with emotion."--Juliana Spahr, author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

"So fantastically simple and so satisfyingly complicated, these poems band together like the days in 'One Day': 'One day after another-/ perfect./ They all fit.'"--John Ashbery

"Beautifully edited by Ben Friedlander with tenderness, intelligence, and care. A superb selection, well-introduced. Selected Poems provides a great sense of the range of Creeley's accomplishment--these poems among the most important of our time--a way of writing with the hesitations and grace of a new-found line, thinking informed by sources from Emily Dickinson to Charlie Parker. Selected Poems is at once a tribute to Creeley, a perfect introduction for new readers, and a valuable distillation for those who have already acquired a taste for Creeley's poetry. The perfect assembly to and for one so fond of saying 'onward.' We can now go onward with these selected poems, onward with these well-chosen words, with thanks to Robert Creeley and to Ben Friedlander."--Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit

"Benjamin Friedlander, himself a fine poet-critic and a great connoisseur of Creeley's poetry, has put together a superb selection."--Marjorie Perloff

"An excellent selection and introduction. It is an edition that acknowledges work that has defined the poet's career while offering a new narrative for the entire oeuvre. It will join UC Press's distinguished and definitive editionsof postwar poetry and will provide us all with a summary guide to Creeley's best work."--Michael Davidson

"In a quiet moment I hear Bob pause where I never would have expected it. Such resolve. Such heart. And an ear to reckon with. No truly further American poem without his."--Clark Coolidge, author of Counting on Planet Zero

About the Author
Robert Creeley (1926-2005) published more than sixty books of poetry, prose, essays, and interviews in the United States and abroad. His many honors included the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Distinguished Professor in the Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown University.
Benjamin Friedlander is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine, is author of Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism among other books. He coedited The Collected Prose of Charles Olson (UC Press) with Donald Allen.

Customer Reviews

precise, profound
So fresh in his language and perceptions, so consistently profound, and so charming -- like James Schuyler or Gary Snyder, Creeley feels genuinely present in his poems: to have this volume on your shelf is to have him in the room with you. More people should know the gentle and inspiring presence of this wonderful teacher and writer. "It's all moved inside, / all that dear world // in mind for forever, / as long as one walks / and talks here, / thinking of you."

A mast poet of moments otherwise unnoticed
Creeley won me over early, in junior high, when my teacher at the time handed a well thumbed book of Mr. Creeley's poetry. From the first page I was caught up in a wonderful tangled world of poems constructed from small moments of happy introspection - given a kind of sincere reverence by Mr. Creeley's intense scrutiny of what even a small moment can mean; a drunken dinner, a ride in a Cadillac, a slice of apple pie topped with ice cream - these moments becomes a minor religious awakening in the hands of Robert Creeley. He is by far my favorite poet, likely because my own small epiphanies are so much like those he writes of.

Always new
Bob Creeley was perhaps the original beatnik, a quiet man who turned himself outward and in so doing made a great impression upon the world with his work and his persona. We should all know more about him -- his best poems (of his many fine ones) should be with us always.