Creeley, R: Memory Gardens

Poems explore a variety of themes including childhood, love, family, time, and the seasons

Always
Apres Anders
Baby Disaster
Back
Bookcase
By The Rude Bidge
Classical
Days
The Doctor
Dogs
The Door
Earth
Eats
Echo
Echo
Edge
Fathers
Flicker
For J.d.
For J.d. (2)
For Pen
For Ted Berrigan
For The New Year
Fort William Henry %pemaquid
Forty
Four For John Daley
Funeral
Go
Hands
Hearts
Heaven Knows
Heavenly Hannah
Heavy
Helen's House
Hotel
Hotel Schrieder, Heidelberg
I'll Win
Ich Bin
Knock, Knock
Language
Lecture
Lost
Lovers
Main And Merrimac
March Moon
Massachusetts May
Memories
Memory
Memory Gardens
Mother's Photograph
My Own Stuff
New England
Nothing
Old
Old Days
Out
Picture
Questions
Religion
The Rock
Room
Skin And Bones
Sound
Summer Nights
Supper
The Tally Stick
Thanksgiving's Done
There
Too Late
Vacation's End
Valentine
Vision
Waiting
Wall
When April And His Showers Sweet
Window
Winter Morning
Wyatt's May
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Any publication at this point in Robert Creeley's career would be cause for celebration, but there are special pleasures to be savored in Memory Gardens, a lovely and accessible work that reminds one of A. R. Ammons' Briefings: Poems SmallandEasy because of its tautness and Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems because of its conversational lilt. This is no book for only the scholars' shelves: Creeley masters an unpretentious and intimate tone throughout the book, sharing his past and his memories of the past food, toys, relatives, and playmates. But there is also an insistent moodiness and contemplative sadness to the work. The poet is now in his sixtieth year, and he is painfully conscious of time: he writes with "stiff old fingers" in "whatever time's left for us here" in a "seeming dullness of enclosure." Images of winter, darkness, and harsh weather reinforce these sober calculations while at the same time providing a foil for the vividly realized moments of perception when he sees "icicles/like teeth," a single "immaculate/ strawberry," and his very own "toes in two/patient rows." Memory Gardens also contains a splendid reminiscence of childhood, "Lovers," a poem in which all "was free the flowers / the lanes we looked / in. . . , " and two moving elegies, "Valentine" (for his mother) and "Doctor" (for his father). Creeley concludes with "A Calendar," a poetic tour de force containing a poem for each of the twelve months of the year. In spite of the highly personal nature of these poems, Creeley manages to incorporate, with admirable ease, key passages from Ginsberg, Olson, Chaucer, Wyatt, and Emerson as part of the text of his poems. Memory Gardens is a book that will wear extremely well. It is certainly one of the three or four most important poetry tides of 1986, and no poetry collection will be complete without it. -- From Independent Publisher