Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3731350 in Books
• Published on: 1994-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 116 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Fittingly, Creeley's ( Windows ) new collection is prefaced by the Coleridge poem "Frost at Midnight," in which the speaker celebrates "This populous village! . . . the numberless goings on of life." Creeley's home in this cacophony is, first and foremost, language; and with his proclivity towards condensation, he brings his ruminations on aging, mortality and memory into focus. Creeley is not so much concerned with material particulars but with the mind's sense of particularity, the minute echoes that clamor for attention in a consciousness unprepared. But for all of his complexity, the poet's responses to his own sense of aging are surprisingly witty, lyrical and grounded: "Dogs barked. Rabits ran. / It comes to such end, / friend." Two longer poems buttress the otherwise epigraphic, crystallized work that makes up much of the collection. The first is "Sonnets," which contrasts the external human landscape of violence with a more internal one. The second is "Roman Sketchbook," which closes the collection--a "confident traveler" wanders the streets of Rome exploring the relationship between the internal and external. For all the "echoes" in the collection, the reader may begin to wonder if there is a unified "intent" at work, but Creeley is one step ahead of us, inserting a little note midway through the book: "So I am not finally . . . even thinking to persuade the reader of some conviction I myself hold dear. I am trying to practice an art." With this "authority" in mind, Echoes succeeds beautifully.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In his half-century of writing poems, Creeley has proven consistently that if contemplated intensely enough, any simple thing can grow complex. The shell game we call perception becomes far more important than anything it shows or hides, and the boundary between object and what evidences its existence grows ever finer. Creeley's latest collection continues to probe that line, particularly the sense that what we see echoes what we think. Midway through he interrupts himself to warn us that any intended "coherence or determining purpose...seems now absent." Not true, since the poems' very spareness and sheer density of abstraction indicate a single, underlying subject so integral that neither articulation of it nor escape from it seems possible. A stenographer of consciousness, Creeley uses shorthand to catch the "shreds of emptying presence" that are the lives we mean to assume. His encryptions of frustration and widening amazement are often thin contradictory braids, maddeningly ungenerous or seemingly simplistic. Yet they echo back what we invest in them and will risk whatever we will. For most collections.
Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Sea, Hill And Wood
Abstract
Alex's Art
Baroque
Billboards: Age
Billboards: Big Time
Billboards: Dream
Billboards: Echo
Billboards: Moral
Billboards: True Or False
Body
A Book
Bowl
Brick
Chain
The Cup
Death
Dutch Boy
East Street
East Street Again
Echo
Echo
Echo
Echo
Echo
Echo
Echoes
Edges
Eyes
Faint Faces
Figure Of Fun
Five Variations On Elation
For Nothing Else
Fragment
Gnomic Verses: Loop
Heaven (2)
Here
Here Again
Here And Now
Here Only
It
My New Mexico
Old
The Old Days
Old Words
One Way
Onward
Other
Parade
Parts: Bird And Calf
Parts: Dog Head With Crescent Moon
Parts: Dog Head With Rabbit Leg
Parts: Dog Leg Wheel
Parts: Goat's Eye
Parts: Horse Leg Dog Head
Parts: Horse's Breath
Parts: Human Leg Goat Leg
Parts: Snake Fish Bird
Personal
The Place
Pure
Reflection
The Road
Roman Sketchbook: Apostrophe
Roman Sketchbook: As
Roman Sketchbook: As With
Roman Sketchbook: Eleven Am
Roman Sketchbook: Here
Roman Sketchbook: How Long
Roman Sketchbook: I Think
Roman Sketchbook: In The Circle
Roman Sketchbook: In The Rooms
Roman Sketchbook: Object
Roman Sketchbook: Outside
Roman Sketchbook: Reading/russell Says, There Is No ...
Roman Sketchbook: Room
Roman Sketchbook: The Street
Roman Sketchbook: Villa Celimontana
Roman Sketchbook: Walk
Roman Sketchbook: Watching
Self Portrait
Shadow
Sins
Sky
Some
Sonnets
There
Thinking Of Wallace Stevens
This House
This Room
Time
Time's Fixed
Translation
Valentine
A View At Evening
Waldoboro Eve
White Fence/white Fence
The Wordsworths
You Were Never Lovelier...
Your
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®