Collected Poems - Hardcover

Paul Auster

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585674044 ISBN 13: 9781585674046

Publisher: Abrams Press, 2004

Synopsis

Paul Auster's penetrating and charged verse resembles little else in recent American poetry. This collection of Auster's poetry, translations, and composition notes from early in his career do much to reinforce the idea that Paul Auster is, indeed, a unique and masterful figure in the literary world.

Taut, densely lyrical, and everywhere informed by a powerful and subtle music, this selection of writings begins with the compact verse fragments of "Spokes" (written when Auster was in his early twenties) and "Unearth," continues on through the more ample meditations of "Wall Writing, Disappearances, Effigies, Fragments From the Cold, Facing the Music," and "White Spaces," then moves further back in time to include Auster's revealing translations of many of the French poets who influenced his own writing, as well as the provocative and previously unpublished ?Notes From A Composition Book? (1967). An introduction by Norman Finkelstein connects biographical elements to a consideration of the work, and takes in Auster's early literary and philosophical influences.

Powerful, haunting, and precise, this view from the past to the present will appeal to those unfamiliar with this aspect of Auster's work, as well as those already acquainted with his poetry.

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of The New York Trilogy and many other critically acclaimed novels. He was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in 2006. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

Before embarking as a novelist, young Paul Auster (City of Glass) published poetry in a variety of small journals and magazines. This handy volume collects all his verse from the late 1960s through 1980. It's poetry very much of its period, oriented toward French mid-century thought and modes. A pale, defeated imagism presides, as visions of whiteness and woundedness unspool from line to line. Things vanish out of the world (a key section is called "Disappearances") and hands clench onto the empty space where they've been. Many of the poems treat the paradoxes of perception and epistemology: "He is alive, and therefore he is nothing/ but what drowns in the fathomless hole/ of his eye,// and what he sees/ is all that he is not." The scholar Norman Finkelstein provides an illuminating introduction, tracing connections between allusions in the poetry and actual events in the young Auster's life, such as the collapse of his parents' marriage and his attendance at riot-torn late '60s Columbia University. To add heft to the slim book, a number of Auster's translations from the French are included, mostly of the surrealist communist poets of a previous era (Breton, Tzara, Eluard) who attained a new popularity when the events of May '68 made them, literally, poster boys for the New Left in Paris. As a translator, Auster is always effective when he employs a small vocabulary, and his work on Tzara is genuinely impressive: "I know I carry the song in me and I am not afraid/ I carry death and if I die it is death." Otherwise Collected Poems remains a curiosity, a tantalizing look at the work of a poet whose breakthrough led him away from line breaks and into the actions of prose.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1585674044
• ISBN 13: 9781585674046
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 205