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Synopsis
"From the first clear grounded 1940s insight snapshots of For Love through his recent decade experiments with syllable by syllable intelligence, Robert Creeley has created a noble life 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
"Visionary and oracular, Creeley has been a worker in the deep romantic vein—words in this poetry are magic, charged as they are in dreams with message of the dark of the human condition."—Robert Duncan
"The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound."—William Carlos Williams
"Robert Creeley's poetry is as basic and necessary as the air we breathe; as hospitable, plain, and open as our continent itself. He is about the best we have."—John Ashbery
"Dear, lovely, decorous, tender—ah, there is no one like him."—Carolyn Kizer
Publishers Weekly
Creeley, poet laureate of New York State, constantly gauges what it means to be human, in poems that cope with the rush of memories, the chaos of dreams, the sudden flare of feelings. His mercurial verses on love and life's vicissitudes respond instinctively to our innate but half-articulated need for roots, familial, social and spiritual. There is a deep strain of pessimism in a poet who proclaims ``both men and women cold / hold at last to no one / die alone.'' From the pared-down, pure diction of ``For Love'' to the recent complex thought-experiments of ``Memory Gardens'' and ``Windows,'' this gathering of 200 poems charts the trajectory of a poet who delights in words and remains true to self. (June)