This definitive collection showcases thirty years of work by one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century, bringing together verse that originally appeared in eight acclaimed books of poetry ranging from Hello: A Journal (1978) to Life & Death (1998) and If I were writing this (2003). Robert Creeley, who was involved with the publication of this volume before his death in 2005, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment—the new postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005 will stand together with The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2000 as essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American poetry.
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.
"The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound."—William Carlos Williams
"It is a study, how Creeley lands syntax down the alley, and his vocabulary-pure English-to hit meters and rhymes all of which are spares and strikes."—Charles Olson
"Robert Creeley has created a noble 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
"His succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond." —John Ashbery
"Robert Creeley was one of the great giants of 20th Century American poetry. This collection is his monument." —Paul Auster
"American poetry is unimaginable and, happily, unknowable without Creeley."—Andrei Codrescu, author of it was today: new poems
"Creeley is a touchstone for me-a measure of what poetry is. He is a genius of the sensorium as Kerouac was and a master of the ear as is Miles Davis. He is a carver in space like Van Gogh."—Michael McClure
"There is no poetry more vivid, immediate, or telling than Robert Creeley's. His Collected Poems extends the achievement of Dickinson, Whitman, and Williams into postwar America. Creeley's excavation of particular words, images, and sentiments resonate beyond the pages of this book into the fabric of everyday life. This is American invention at its best, as necessary as the air we breathe and the ground we walk on."—Charles Bernstein
"'It isn't what a poet says that counts as a work of art,' William Carlos Williams once wrote, 'it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.' I can't think of another contemporary poet whose acute sensitivity to the particular event of making (and in poetry making includes breaking) each written line is as consummately fine-tuned as Robert Creeley's."—Susan Howe
"He was the main support in the old house of poetry—the main beam."—C.D. Wright, Brown University alumni newsletter
"There is no poet like Creeley. His multiple subjectivities and magic syllables have kept us curious and honest. Never a false step, never a less than tender heart for the sound, and the brilliant cognitive, often fierce power therein. What a glorious long life in writing. These late poems keep the brilliant tempo. We are very lucky he is still so much among us."—Anne Waldman
"Robert Creeley transformed the momentary, spontaneous music of being alive into a profoundly enduring American art: brilliant, necessary, impeccably scored. He made it new for always."—Peter Gizzi
688 pp.5.5 x 8.25
9780520256200$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jun 2008