Selected Poems - Hardcover

Duncan, Robert Edward; Bertholf, Robert J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811212270 ISBN 13: 9780811212274

Publisher: New Directions, 1993

Synopsis

A collection of poetry deals with such topics as love, death, revelation, religion, humanity, and war

About this title

Reviews

Duncan (1919-1987) was one of the true masters of contemporary American poetry. His oeuvre is by turns lyrical, experimental, archaic, visionary and political. His most innovative works ("Structure of Rime" and "Passages") have been epic in nature and interspersed among shorter poems throughout several volumes, so that it has been virtually impossible to get a sense of his full poetic powers without reading his mature books, from 1960 on, in order. Bertholf's selections are so attuned to the essentials of Duncan's ( Ground Work: Before the War ; Roots and Branches ) writing--the idiosyncratic spellings, the attention and respect given the muses, the horrific sense of war--that even those familiar with the whole body of Duncan's work will become more sensitized to his recurring imagery and consistency of thought pattern through this collection. "Writing is first a search in obedience," he says in a relatively early poem. And, varying this concept in one of his final poems, written during a long, painful illness: "What Angel, what Gift of the Poem, has brought into my / body / this sickness of living?" In Bertholf's brief, insightful introduction, he makes necessary connections between the often-neglected early work and the later masterpieces.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Duncan, who died in 1987 with over 40 books and chapbooks to his name, is often linked with Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and other stars of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s. Such associations tend to dilute the importance of this writer, whose ambitious, idiosyncratic poems stand on their own. They are as classically elegant as they are starkly avant-garde, as erotic as they are intellectual, and they are almost always beautiful to the ear. Duncan is particularly celebrated for his love poems, which are well represented here. The most beautiful, perhaps, is "The Torso Passages 18," which ends: "Gathering me, you gather/ yourself/ for my other is not a woman but a man/ the king upon whose bosom let me lie." Robert Bertholf's short introduction emphasizes Duncan's eclectic range, his interest in painting and philosophy as well as poetry, and his dedication to the art. Long overdue, this collection is a fine introduction to Duncan; one does, however, hope for a "complete works."-- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0811212270
• ISBN 13: 9780811212274
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 147
• Editor: Berthoff Robert J.