Reviews

• Arrived before the scheduled date. Book was well-packaged in a small box with bubble wrap. Book is in NEW condition. Book dust jacket intact and in excellent condition. Very happy with this purchase.

• I have read many glowing reviews of Creeley over the years and so decided to invest in this book, but was greatly disappointed. It's a littl like a case of the emperor's new clothes. The poems are typical of the faults of much of the insular faculty poetry of the west of the past 70 years - unambitious, over-reliant on line breaks to attempt to create an effect (for example try removing the and the poems simply read as prose), and a general feeling of a lack of necessity in the poems - e.g. they didn't need really to be written. Not particularly what Creeley's reputation is built on, because I wouldn't even describe it as mediocre but uninspired poetry - actually rather incompetent, a little embarrassing in its lack of quality and not even really qualifying as poetry. It's probably the most disappointed I've ever been in a purchase of poetry. Incredibly pretentious and vacuous stuff. It's borderline insulting to pass stuff like this off to the public, and I pity any young reader who picks this up as an example. I will give some examples below, all of which by the way are full examples and not excerpts as one may think: HERE Here is where there is. HEY Hey kid you. * Flesh filled to bursting. YOU Back and forth across time, lots of things one needs one's hand held for. Don't stumble, in the dark. Keep walking. This is life. 'OH, LOVE . . .' Oh love, falling- the word one tries to say are facts, the steps, the walk down place and time. LOVE Tracking through this interminable sadness - like somebody said, change the record. BUT if we go back to where we never be we'll be there. [REPEAT] But

• This is the poem we posted in the personals section of our local newspaper when our son graduated from high school many years past. Hey kid/you. * Flesh filled/to bursting. Here’s another, two pages further in. It’s entitled “HERE”: Here is/ where there/is. That was the Creeley I first became attached to, the poet of short bursts of thought or emotion, concentrating on sometimes hidden sometimes obvious essentials, a wordworker with ordinary language, short on extravagance or superstructure, un-ornate and anti-Baroque. Read especially “Numbers”, a long set of poems and poem fragments dedicated to painter Robert Indiana. They’re what Plato would have written if he were a Zen monk. Creeley wrote that these poems emerged as “a matter or process rather than product, that is, of scribbling, of writing for the immediacy of the pleasure … without paying attention to some final code of significance.” I already own who knows how many books of poems by Creeley (1926-2005) so why did I buy these two volumes, which collect poems written across a sixty-year career? First, there are books of Creeley’s that I don‘t own: Creeley wrote prolificly. Second, I wanted to read the poems together and chronologically –or roughly so: you don’t plow your way straight through 1300 pages of poems, you need time and space to think through what you’ve read. In the preface to The Charm, his 1969 collection of his early and unpublished poems, Creeley reminisced about a conversation he had had with Allen Ginsberg years before. Ginsberg said to him, “you don’t have to worry so much about writing a ‘bad’ poem. You can afford to now.” And poet Robert Duncan insisted to him “that poetry is not some ultimate preserve for the most rarified and articulate of human utterances, but has a place for all speech and all occasions thereof.” That’s sound advice, especially for a poet whose special province was the immediate. There‘s a fair amount of dross in this collection but that’s part of the process. It’s redeemed by what’s so good in this collection, the exceptional output of our premiere buccaneer-poet.

• Robert Creeley's poetry has a deceptive simplicity that grew out of a need to get said what he had in mind. So what one reads are his thoughts and feelings as experience of what he might call "a singular consciousness." Perhaps all men and women are created equal in some political sense, but Creeley is an extraordinarily loving, intelligent and sane person, particularly in his later years. There is depth and strength of the emotion communicated. He usually wrote short poems with stanzas of three or four short lines, his language and punctuation seem fairly normal, with an uncomplicated physical relationship to time and place, yet he has true ear for the subtle off-rhyme and an good eye for visceral beauty. This is a collection of his work from 1975, when he was 49, until his death in 2005, these were years where he taught mostly in Buffalo but he also traveled extensively with his family to Finland, Berlin, New Zealand and many other places, often as a guest lecturer. So, one gets a picture of what one person did experience in the big world. And the Kindle version is extremely useful to anyone who may be likewise on the move.

• This book and its companion volume, "The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-1975," are handy to get to know Creeley's work in one fell swoop. Because the quality of craft and inspiration in Creeley's poems were consistently high, getting to know all of them is more than worth the time. My quibble here is that the type size is uncomfortably small, compared to both its companion and the separate New Directions titles collected here. Compared side-by-side, the difference might not seem huge but it makes reading these poems more laborious than necessary. Despite this potential snag, unless you're going to eventually procure all the New Directions titles, this book is still a worthwhile purchase.

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