Selected Poems - Softcover

Waldrop, Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1632430207 ISBN 13: 9781632430205

Publisher: Omnidawn, 2016

Synopsis

Keith Waldrop is a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet. His accomplishment is difficult to describe because his work refuses, in Bartelby-like fashion, the twin traps of impassivity and affectation: “On my one hand, / stasis -- on the / other, striving for effect.” In one of his very few interviews, Waldrop says: “I think the worst fault a poem can have is striving for effect.” Waldrop never strives; instead, he haunts―his presence is all the more powerful for barely being there, like a ghost you discover in a familiar photograph.

About this title

About the Author

KEITH WALDROP (born Emporia, Kansas, 1932) retired from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he still lives and, with Rosmarie Waldrop, is editor of the small press Burning Deck. His recent poetry books are The Not Forever (Omnidawn) and Transcendental Studies (University of California Press,National Book Award 2009). Siglio has published a book of collages, Several Gravities. His novel, Light While There Is Light, has been reissued by Dalkey Archive. He has translated Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen (Wesleyan University Press).

Review

“This gathering of Keith Waldrop’s poems written between 1968-2013 provides point-instants of light—taut messages whose music holds flesh to the bone. In these subtle, haunted poems, even punctuation can be transcendently attended through the ear. Reading this taut work filled with wordplay and insight, I recover memory traces present in ‘a little comma or/slightest/ pause.’ This collection is a quiet splendor.” (Susan Howe, author of Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives)

Edition details

• Publisher: Omnidawn
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1632430207
• ISBN 13: 9781632430205
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312