cover image New Collected Poems

New Collected Poems

George Oppen. New Directions Publishing Corporation, $37.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-8112-1488-9

A Modernist who was part of the Objectivist group that included Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky and Carl Rakosi, George Oppen (1908-1984) won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his masterpiece, Of Being Numerous. New Collected Poems gathers that work, along with some missing from the 1975 Collected. Edited by poet Michael Davidson, it includes Primitive (the last volume Oppen published, in 1978) as well as previously unpublished work. Admirers of Oppen's foundational volumes should be very pleased with this update. ( Feb.)