Stephen Burt writes:
To listen to Creeley at his best is to listen, often uncomfortably, to men and women speaking behind closed doors, to hear what they say to themselves and to each other when they do not know what else to do. Creeley arrived – he wanted to arrive – as part of an anti-Frostian, anti-traditional, wing of American verse: Olson, and Black Mountain, and postwar jazz, helped him develop his sense of line, his sparse, even teasing placement of words on a page. And yet Creeley now seems to belong to a much older and nearly continuous enterprise. He dedicated Collected Poems 1975-2005 ‘with love, for Herrick and Zukofsky’: affiliation with late-modern innovators, such as Louis Zukofsky and Olson, first got Creeley noticed, but his likeness to earlier makers of lyric poems – to Herrick, Housman, Hardy, Gurney, Frost – will help his verse endure. Few poets have had their reception more affected by the wind of the times, which at one point seemed to blow right in Creeley’s direction. Yet we read not a zeitgeist but a book of poems, and behind the poems a man: shy at the core, aggressive in the beginning, melancholy at the end. Few writers have done more with fewer words.

California | hardback 662 pp. |ISBN: 9780520241596