If I Were Writing This - Hardcover

Creeley, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811215563 ISBN 13: 9780811215565

Publisher: New Directions, 2004

Synopsis

New poetry by one of America's most acclaimed and respected poets. The poems of If I Were Writing This, Robert Creeley's first major collection since the highly praised Life & Death (1998), have an "aching sweetness" that speak to the preciousness of life as the poet both faces his own mortality and simultaneously looks on a world suddenly more precarious and fragile. In these poems there is longing, a twinge of regret sometimes, a bit of nostalgia, the sadness of passing time, but finally no regrets and no self-pity, just an understanding that this is what it is to be human, an acknowledgment that life is uncertain but also bracing and positive. Creeley himself comments: "Given the bleak vulnerability of the world and of our own country's dogmatic commitment to violence, what can either poet or poetry do? For one thing, insist on feelinginsist on witnessinsist on being here, in this 'phenomenal world, ' as Lawrence called it, 'which is raging and yet apart.' Age brings experience, not wisdom; age makes time actualeach day anotheruntil there is no more. These poems have been my company, my solace, my feelings, my heart. When they cannot speak, it will all be silence."

About this title

Review

..".with syllable by syllable intelligence, Robert Creeley has created a noble life body of poetry that extends the work of his predecessors Pound, Wiliams, Zukofsky, and Olson and provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness."

About the Author

Robert Creeley (1926-2005) published more than sixty books of poetry, prose, essays, and interviews in the United States and abroad, including "If I Were Writing This, Selected Poems 1945-1990, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005, "and "The Island. "His many honors include the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Distinguished Professor in the Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown University.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811215563
• ISBN 13: 9780811215565
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 103