Robert Creeley died yesterday, March 30, 2022



Post Edited (04-02-05 22:57)

sorry, I posted a topic without seeing yours

that's ok, Bob doesn't mind... glad to see some other interst in him. He is a fine person.

Peter

MEMORY

I'd wanted
ease of year,
light in the darkness,
end of fears.

For the babe newborn
was my belief,
in the manger,
in that simple barn.

So since childhood
animals
brought back kindness,
made possible care.

But this world now
with its want, its pain,
its tyrannic confusions
and hopelessness,

sees no star
far shining,
no wonder as light
in the night.

Only us then
remember, discover,
still can care for
the human.

(December)

POETRY
Robert Creeley
MEMORY GARDENS
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"; "Apres 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").

"One of the very few contemporaries with whom it is essential to keep in
contact." —Hugh Kenner

"Creeley is absolutely mesmerizing in his ability to suspend and to define the passage of thought, the process of experience in all its ironic, inexorable sadness. No poetic theories are required to support such art: it achieves its own permanence by relating at ofice to our own groping, semi-articulate wonder."
—Joyce Carol Gates, The New Republic

[Also by Robert Creeley: Hello, New Directions Paperbook 451; Later, NDP488; Mirrors, NDP559.]

Cover photograph, by Denny Moers; design by Hermann Strohbach
A NEW DIRECTIONS PAPERBOOK NDP613

I Know A Man<br />
<br />
As I sd to my<br />

friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

Robert Creeley