cover image Selected Poems

Selected Poems

Robert Duncan. New Directions Publishing Corporation, $12.95 (147pp) ISBN 978-0-8112-1227-4

Duncan (1919-1987) was one of the true masters of contemporary American poetry. His oeuvre is by turns lyrical, experimental, archaic, visionary and political. His most innovative works (``Structure of Rime'' and ``Passages'') have been epic in nature and interspersed among shorter poems throughout several volumes, so that it has been virtually impossible to get a sense of his full poetic powers without reading his mature books, from 1960 on, in order. Bertholf's selections are so attuned to the essentials of Duncan's ( Ground Work: Before the War ; Roots and Branches ) writing--the idiosyncratic spellings, the attention and respect given the muses, the horrific sense of war--that even those familiar with the whole body of Duncan's work will become more sensitized to his recurring imagery and consistency of thought pattern through this collection. ``Writing is first a search in obedience,'' he says in a relatively early poem. And, varying this concept in one of his final poems, written during a long, painful illness: ``What Angel, what Gift of the Poem, has brought into my / body / this sickness of living?'' In Bertholf's brief, insightful introduction, he makes necessary connections between the often-neglected early work and the later masterpieces. (Mar.)