byRobert Creeley

If I were writing this was the last book of poems completed by Robert Creeley and published during his lifetime (New Directions, 2005). The words he wrote to describe this book are oddly prophetic: “Age brings experience, not wisdom; age makes time actual - each day another - until 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.” Though Creeley died in 2005, his poems are not silent - they vibrantly continue to embrace life while acknowledging, with no self-pity, the inevitability of death. The message (as he always ended his letters) is “Onward!”

byRobert Creeley

Just in Time: Poems 1984-1994 continues the consolidation of Robert Creeley’s later work begun withSo There: Poems 1976-83 (1998).Just in Time combinesMemory Gardens (1986),Windows (1990), andEchoes (1994) in a volume that further validates the Lifetime Achievement Awards conferred on Creeley by the Before Columbus Foundation in 2000 and the Lannan Foundation in 2001. The poet himself comments about his later work: “Much echoes in these poems from the necessary ’voyage to oblivion’ they prepare for, but they are fact of no simple despair. Each day stays specific, possible, each relation defining, whether of life or of death. As my longtime mentor, W. C. Williams, best put it, ’The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned ….’One continues and learns despite.”

byRobert Creeley

In 1999 Robert Creeley received the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Both honors made specific note of his experimental style, his long influence, and his ongoing importance. Robert Creeley’s stature has been further confirmed by a Lifetime Achievement Award conferred by the Before Columbus Foundation as part of its American Book Awards 2000. Creeley’s 1998 collection,Life & Death, now available as a New Directions Paperbook, is a high point in a career that has poignantly combined “linguistic abstraction with specificity of time and place” (R. D. Pohl,Buffalo News).

byRobert Creeley

So There: Poems 1976-83 combines three earlier collections of Robert Creeley’s work published by New Directions ––Hello: A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976 (published 1978);Later (1979); andMirrors (1983). This first gathering of the poet’s later work continues but also stands in contrast to his early poems as presented in the monumentalCollected Poems 1945-1975 (University of California Press, 1982). Few poets have so clear a demarcation in their work. In 1976, Creeley set off to visit nine countries in the Far East, to explore his sense of self in a foreign landscape. He found not only a “company” of fellow beings but also a transformed sense of life and subsequently a new family. He sees today that these three books in a single volume emphasize the “determined change in my life they are the issue of.” They record a watershed period when Creeley “moved beyond his early influences to become a unique master” (Publishers Weekly, aboutMirrors).

byRobert Creeley

Echoes is an exploration of the limits and resonances, public and personal, of age. Included in this collection is “Sonnets,” an outcry against human violence and dogmatism (“Come round again the banal / belligerence almost a / flatulent echo of times”), while the book’s closing sequence, “Roman Sketchbook,” contemplates with wit and affection the measure of one’s literal body in echoing time and place. Creeley as ever articulates the givens of life, its daily fact and possibility with careful, concise invention.

byRobert Creeley

Windows is Robert Creeley’s first collection of poems sinceMemory Gardens (1986). It marks, as its title implies, a framing of realities that is neither simply passive nor reflective. For Creeley, age and travel have served to highlight the foreignness of everyday circumstances, so that the window-passages between “inside” and “out” have become increasingly more necessary for survival.

byRobert Creeley

The title of Robert Creeley’s new gathering of poems,Memory Gardens, softly announces his meditative theme. As on a quiet walk through a familiar landscape, the poet leads us along paths of recollection. Thoughts turn back upon themselves, evoking half-forgotten intangibles of past moments. Childhood and family, old loves lost and new loves gained, the change of seasons, supper in the kitchen––it is such particularities as these that Creeley catches with the spare lines of his tight constructions. Though comprised of short poems in the main, the collection includes three exceptional sequences: the poignant “Four for John Daley”; “Après Anders,” macaronic improvisations on work by the German poet Richard Anders; and “A Calendar,” a group of twelve poems, one for each month of the year, appropriately concluding the book with a December “Memory” (“Only us then/remember, discover,/still can care for/the human”).

byRobert Creeley

Love and loss, birth and death, the passage of time are recurrent themes inMirrors, Robert Creeley’s first major collection of new work since 1979. Seizing on the particulars of his own life and others’, the poems gathered here are not so much meditations as reflections, the “mirrors” of the title, of the poet’s world then and now. The British critic James Campbell, writing in theTimes Literary Supplement, has said that “behind Creeley’s best work… is a perpetual counting of blessings, a continual record of the minutest feelings and tiniest sensations of the heart and mind.” And indeed, inMirrors, Creeley moves us with his quiet simplicity as he takes us further into ourselves, pointing us toward the warm truths, the sad ones as well, we can find there.

byRobert Creeley

The epigraph toLater, Robert Creeley’s second book of poems published by New Directions, enjoins the reader to “hold in mind/ All that has loved you or been kind.” This commitment to the continuity of life on a fragile planet, limited by both time and space, has become increasingly important to a poet who, “if older,” takes a certain pride in knowing the boundaries of the possible. Where his 1978 verse journal Hello chronicled an actual journey (to New Zealand, Australia, and the Far East),Later deals with an interior exploration rooted in everyday sights and sounds––the play of light and shadow through a window, the lap of waves on a beach. Past occurrences and expectations are reconciled with an acceptance of inevitable change, and in the poignant title sequence Creeley marvels, “but now the wonder of life is/ that it is at all.”

byRobert Creeley

With a lilt––“’That’s the way / (that’s the way) / I like it / (I like it)’”––Robert Creeley begins his verse journalHello, the record of a whirlwind tour of Southeast Asia. Starting in Fiji, he then spent a month in New Zealand (the trip having been sponsored by the New Zealand Arts Council), followed in a few weeks’ time by stays in Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea. It was a singular experience, coming as it did at a time of much change in the poet’s personal life. He went, as he remarks in a postscript, “because I wanted to––to look, to see, even if briefly, how people in those parts of the world made a reality, to talk of being American, of the past war, of power, of usual life in this country, of my fellow and sister poets, of my neighbors on Fargo Street in Buffalo, New York. I wanted, at last, to be human, however simplistic that wish. I took thus my own chances and remarkably found a company.” The text is a graph of outward detail and inner change, kaleidoscopic in its sense of moving from place to place, warm in its feeling of being at home in the human community.