This volume comes from The University of California Press, which suggests it will be among the better collections, and also that it will do nothing to generate any public interest (as might a volume from a trade press).
Here is a passage from The New York Times review:
No American poet was more influential or imitated over the next quarter-century, an influence that was not entirely benign. What can sometimes seem offhand, slight and casually improvised in Creeley’s work is not at all what it appears to be. But these are the qualities and attendant sense of permission that lesser writers fastened on. Creeley, as with many masters, whether in sport or literature, made it look easy.
The poems of the ’50s and ’60s, and many thereafter, tend to be small, stripped-down affairs, as bare-boned as Beckett. They are asymmetrical, highly tensile constructions. The voice is anonymous, agitated, distressed. The movement of a typical Creeley poem is halting, and jittery, with the lines turning nervously back on themselves, particular words or phrases served up over and over in different syntactical contexts, the poet worrying them for meaning. Here is a bit of “The Rain”:
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for mesomething other than this,
something not so insistent —
and I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting outof the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.Among the many influences at work in Creeley’s poetry, William Carlos Williams seems to be foremost, most evidently in the unusual weight Creeley gives to enjambment in his lines. It is through this device that the poet creates his signature set of tensions. Few other poets, including Williams, make such telling events of their line breaks. But also in the mix from Williams is the plain diction and conversational tone. Both poets were fascinated with the cadences of ordinary American talk. Also, both poets steer clear of metaphor and simile. And if Williams is wary of adjectives, Creeley seems to have a real abhorrence of them.
From Ezra Pound as well as Williams, Creeley learned concision. The silences and what is left out of any given Creeley poem carry equal weight with what is written down, and it is impossible to read Creeley intelligently without taking this into account, much as one has to do with traditional Chinese or Japanese poetry. Also, it was through Pound that Creeley was introduced to the poetry of Thomas Campion and other Jacobeans, whose music and use of rhyme he found compatible with his own poetic enterprise. Creeley, when using rhyme, employs it at unpredictable intervals and as a form of emphasis. The poet was also clearly drawn to the Elizabethan and Jacobean anonymity of voice and form of address, usually to a woman — in which case the site of address is likely to be the bedroom — or himself. Creeley has no equal among modern love poets writing in English, even if love for Creeley is characteristically an occasion for turmoil and rather grim business. Here is “The Warning” in its entirety:
For love — I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.For readers coming to Creeley’s work for the first time, the format of a “Selected Poems” is the best way in, and this new “Selected,” supplanting a 1991 edition, is well chosen by Benjamin Friedlander. It includes a number of moving later poems not included in the earlier volume, many on the subject of aging, most notably the poem “When I Think” from Creeley’s final collection, “On Earth.”
Read the whole review.
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