Windows

Creeley's ( Memory Gardens ) singular aesthetic vision remains strikingly evident as he continues to prod the boundaries of language and expression. Characteristically spare and tightly structured, these poems reflect the poet's concern with the relationship between speech and silence, and the circular, reflexive quality of time and human experience: ``Recorders ages hence will look for us / . . . in some common places of feeling, / small enough--but isn't the human / just that echoing, resonant edge/of what it knows it knows. . . .'' Creeley seeks a way of ``seeing'' beyond the ``vacant'' mirrors and ``empty'' reflections of ``life's `lifelike' reality''--``windows'' that offer the possibility of new perspectives and perceptions. In fact, these carefully honed poems themselves function as ``frames'' through which Creeley measures with mature insight and inventiveness the limits of reality and existence: ``Such small dimension / finally, the comfortable / end of it, . . . / . . . world shrunk / to some recollected / edge of where it used to be. . . .'' (May)