Product Description

New poetry by one of America's most acclaimed and respected poets.

The poems of If I Were Writing This, Robert Creeley's first major collection since the highly praised Life & Death (1998), have an "aching sweetness" that speak to the preciousness of life as the poet both faces his own mortality and simultaneously looks on a world suddenly more precarious and fragile. In these poems there is longing, a twinge of regret sometimes, a bit of nostalgia, the sadness of passing time, but finally no regrets and no self-pity, just an understanding that this is what it is to be human, an acknowledgment that life is uncertain but also bracing and positive.

Creeley himself comments: "Given the bleak vulnerability of the world and of our own country's dogmatic commitment to violence, what can either poet or poetry do? For one thing, insist on feeling—insist on witness—insist on being here, in this 'phenomenal world,' as Lawrence called it, 'which is raging and yet apart.' Age brings experience, not wisdom; age makes time actual—each day another—until there is no more. These poems have been my company, my solace, my feelings, my heart. When they cannot speak, it will all be silence."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1525719 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 96 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Creeley won the Bolligen Prize in 1999, a Before Columbus Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, and a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001 following his magisterial, darkly nuanced last collection, Life & Death (1998). This book seems at first like the slightly lighter continuing of that book's themes and modes. Poems linger over friends and pleasures with frequent rhyme while contemplating "the one who's in between/ the others who have come and gone." One of a number of poems for or involving Allen Ginsberg find it has been "No contest./ One's one again. It's done." "Supper," meanwhile, becomes an occasion for darkly celebrating cycles of continuance: "I am ahead. I am not dead./ Shovel it in." The 54 tiny quatrains of "Drawn & Quartered" make their little cuts with serrated precision: " `Man, this stuff/ is rough!'/ `What would you pay/ to make it go way?' " As with Ashbery, who is Creeley's exact contemporary, it is difficult to do more with this late work than to say that no one else could have written it, and that it is marvelous and oddly summative. Some readers will think of Stevens, others of William Bronk, still others of Wordsworth or John Clare at moments. Filled with snapshot-like memories, asides on physical difficulties and explicit exhortations ("Please, don't put/ if you can help it, your loved ones in/ a care facility, they will only die there"), the last few poems depart from Creeley's minimalist implosion to track twined past and present. This aphoristic, playful, loving and sharply focused book gives readers its speaker's precise location: "Physical hill stands my will./ Mind's ambience alters all."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
A moving engagement with friends, family...and fragments of literature....Creeley...is one of the most distinguished living American poets. -- Tom Devaney, Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 April 2004

Creeley has quarreled and questioned, and in poems unfailingly direct and generous he has indefatigably pressed forward. -- Gary Hawkins, Pleiades, Summer 2004

Creeley's poetry is now at a tremendous peak. -- Richard Hell, Bookforum, Spring 2004

Creeley's starkly robust new collection...is a moving engagement and lively reckoning of friends, family, and literature itself. -- Tom Devaney, Boog City, 1 March 2004

Here Creeley's riffs reach the formal height and emotional depth of his old work. -- Poetry, December 2003

One of our best-loved and most reliably human poets. Creeley...gives us a moving view from the edge. As always. -- Dana Wilde, Bangor Daily News, 12 April 2004

The taut, poignant, painstaking exploration that distinguishes Creeley's poetry at its best. -- Talisman, Thomas Fink, Winter 2005

[Creeley's] work enlivens form, and, most importantly, it is earnest and comforting. -- The Southeast Review, Matthew Corey, Winter 2004-2005

[Creeley] is a poet of construction, pattern, concentration of energy. -- William Doreski, Harvard Review, Spring/Summer 2004

About the Author
Robert Creeley is winner of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1999, a Lifetime Achievement Award conferred by the Before Columbus Foundation in 2000, and a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001 (in addition to previous prizes too numerous to cite here).