As Ever: Selected Poems

This collection of Joanne Kyger's work reveals her as one of the major experimenters, hybridizers, and visionaries of poetry. Kyger is a poet of place, with a strong voice-delicate, graceful, and never wasteful; her poems explore themes of friendship, love, community, and morality and draw on Native American myth as well as Asian religion and philosophy. Kyger's love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consciousness-expansion and lesson, but always in the realm of the everyday. Edited with a foreword by Michael Rothenberg, and with an introduction by poet David Meltzer, this book is a marvelous overview of a wonderfully challenging and important poet.

Book Magazine

Writing in the American Buddhist traditions of Philip Whalen, Lew Welch and Gary Snyder (once her husband), Kyger has spent some forty years exploring Asian poetics, indulging and reveling in a collage of images and sounds. Her most prevalent form is the daybook, or journal entry, which can be a mixed bag of tricks. The worst lines are merely banal, while the best ones offer a visionary conviction, deeply informed by attentive and disciplined observation. However, even the seemingly empty lines faithfully celebrate life's many pleasant accidents because, as the author reminds us, "The real state is called golden / where things are exactly what they are." It's no surprise, then, that in this kind of poetry few poems can stand alone; one must read the whole book to get to the golden state.

Joanne Kyger comes out of a West Coast School of writers that included Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Jack Spicer, and Richard Brautigan. She has traveled extensively in Japan and India and has maintained a lifelong interest in Buddhism. She is the author of more than twenty-five books and broadsides.