Gustaf Sobin's
Uncollected Poems brings under one set of covers some fugitive pieces that did not make it into his official posthumous
Collected Poems (2010), together with some occasional works and two full-length volumes that stood outside the normal trajectory of his poetry:
Articles of Light and Elation and
Sicilian Miniatures, the former published in a bibliophile edition and the latter never distributed commercially. This
Uncollected fills out the picture of the author's work more fully than ever before.
"Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious." -Charles Tomlinson
Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005) was an American expatriate poet, resident for many years in Provence. He was born in Boston, and graduated from Brown University in 1957. In 1962, he moved to France, meeting René Char during his early days in Paris, a poet whose work he greatly admired and whose poetry was to have a great influence on his own. It was Char who suggested that Sobin go to Provence, and he promptly did so, settling in a small hamlet in the Luberon, not far from Char's home town. He was able to purchase an old silk cocoonery, and then to live frugally, while trying to find his way as a writer. In 1968 he married an English painter, Susannah Bott. For the rest of his life he and his family were to live in this old building, occasionally extended when the need arose. Sobin was eventually to build himself a small cabanon some 50 yards from the house, along a tree-lined path, where he could write, always standing. It took some years before he was to find his poetic voice, and it was only in 1973 that he wrote what he considered to be his first poem, notwithstanding two chapbooks which had appeared in the 1960s. In the 1970s, his work was taken up by Eliot Weinberger's pioneering magazine 'Montemora' which went on to publish his first two collections, 'Wind Chrysalid's Rattle' and 'Celebration of the Sound Through' as supplements to the journal. Subsequent collections were published by New Directions and Talisman House. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Sobin also published four novels and a fine collection of essays on Provence, 'Luminous Debris'. His Collected Poems were published posthumously in 2010, and Shearsman will release a new edition of this important volume in 2025.
