Stephen Burt writes:

Creeley’s quiet poems demand that we read them slowly, even when they appear brief and simple. Taken too fast, or too many at a time, his poems can sound cramped, monotonous and repetitive. Read at leisure, the best poems are subtle, musically gifted, memorably terse. Such an oeuvre places unusual pressure on the editor of a posthumous selection: Ben Friedlander has done it right. His Selected Poems represents all Creeley’s periods and everything Creeley did well: For Love rightly dominates the early going, and every late volume gets at least some space, while the prose-and-verse journals and collaborations (such as A Day Book) are mined for what gems they hold. Friedlander’s introduction emphasises the continuity of Creeley’s efforts, making a case on behalf of the work as a whole. Only the table of contents indicates which poems came from what volume; the poems themselves appear as a continuous stream, which rightly draws the focus away from books and phases and towards individual poems – I had never noticed how good ‘People’ was, for example, until Friedlander reframed it here.

(LRB 21 February 2008)

California | paperback 339 pp. |ISBN: 9780520251960