Selected Poems (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Duncan, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811213455 ISBN 13: 9780811213455

Publisher: New Directions, 1997

Synopsis

This second edition of the late Robert Duncan's Selected Poems, first published in 1993, includes eleven additional poems and excerpts.

Duncan, like Dante, was a poet of cosmic imagination, intensely aware of his and poetry's role in the ever-expanding logos of creation. His Selected Poems, first published in 1993, is a "useful and portable compilation," says critic Tom Clark, that "provides the most comprehensive available look at the career of the Bay Area's greatest lyric poet." Editor Robert J. Bertholf has enlarged the original collection to include eleven additional poems and excerpts. The second edition of the Selected Poems fully fleshes out the retrospective of works chosen from the whole of Duncan's writing life. From his early poems through his final Ground Work volumes, as well as his serial poems, "Structures of Rime" and "Passages," composed over the course of thirty years, there emerges a prophetic voice of great perception.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Duncan (1919–1988) was a 20th century American poet affiliated with the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement.

From the Back Cover

Duncan, like Dante, was a poet of cosmic imagination, intensely aware of his and poetry's role in the ever-expanding logos of creation. His Selected Poems, first published in 1993, is a "useful and portable compilation", says critic Tom Clark, that "provides the most comprehensive available look at the career of the Bay Area's greatest lyric poet". Editor Robert J. Bertholf has enlarged the original collection to include eleven additional poems and excerpts. The second edition of the Selected Poems fully fleshes out the retrospective of works chosen from the whole of Duncan's writing life. From his early poems through his final Ground Work volumes, as well as his serial poems, "Structures of Rime" and "Passages", composed over the course of thirty years, there emerges a prophetic voice of great perception.

Reviews

This revised and enlarged edition of selections from Duncan's ten major collections comes only a few years after the last (LJ 3/1/93), incorporating minor changes Duncan made before his death in 1988, and adding only 11 poems, all written before the mid-1960s. A romantic with a passion for experimentation, Duncan assimilated and transformed influences as diverse as Dante, Blake, Eliot, and Stein, embroidering a dense tapestry of allusive and emotionally generous vatic poetry for a postwar audience haunted by a sense of fragmentation and loss, yet energized by newfound aesthetic and spiritual possibilities. If at times his poems echo the intonation of ancient texts or trust too much to the reader's scholarly inclinations, they also revel in the here and now ("And it is the beauty of where we have been living that is the poetry of the hour.") with equal conviction. Recommended, but note that this edition differs only marginally from 1993's, and is no substitute for a much needed collected poems.?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0811213455
• ISBN 13: 9780811213455
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 172
• Editor: Bertholf Robert J.