The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005

The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound.-William Carlos WilliamsIt is a study, how Creeley lands syntax down the alley, and his vocabulary-pure English-to hit meters and rhymes all of which are spares and strikes.-Charles OlsonRobert Creeley has created a noble body of poetry that extends the work of his predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson, and provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness.-Allen GinsbergHis succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond. -John AshberyRobert Creeley was one of the great giants of 20th Century American poetry. This collection is his monument. -Paul AusterAmerican poetry is unimaginable and, happily, unknowable without Creeley.-Andrei Codrescu, author of it was today: new poemsCreeley is a touchstone for me-a measure of what poetry is. He is a genius of the sensorium as Kerouac was and a master of the ear as is Miles Davis. He is a carver in space like Van Gogh.-Michael McClureThere is no poetry more vivid, immediate, or telling than Robert Creeley's. His Collected Poems extends the achievement of Dickinson, Whitman, and Williams into postwar America. Creeley's excavation of particular words, images, and sentiments resonate beyond the pages of this book into the fabric of everyday life. This is American invention at its best, as necessary as the air we breathe and the ground we walk on.-Charles Bernstein'It isn't what a poet says that counts as a work of art,' William Carlos Williams once wrote, 'it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.' I can't think of another contemporary poet whose acute sensitivity to the particular event of making (and in poetry making includes breaking) each written line is as consummately fine-tuned as Robert Creeley's.-Susan HoweHe was the main support in the old house of poetry-the main beam.-C.D. Wright, Brown University alumni newsletterThere is no poet like Creeley. His multiple subjectivities and magic syllables have kept us curious and honest. Never a false step, never a less than tender heart for the sound, and the brilliant cognitive, often fierce power therein. What a glorious long life in writing. These late poems keep the brilliant tempo. We are very lucky he is still so much among us.-Anne WaldmanRobert Creeley transformed the momentary, spontaneous music of being alive into a profoundly enduring American art: brilliant, necessary, impeccably scored. He made it new for always.-Peter Gizzi