Customer Reviews

The Alchemist to Mercury: An Alternate Opus: Uncollected Poems 1960-1980

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This collection of work by one of America's most important post-modernist poets was painstakingly gathered by Jed Rasula from some of the obscure literary magazines and small presses that Robert Kelly has favored throughout what has now become a long and always distinguished career. Very few of these poems have appeared in Black Sparrow's elegant collections of Kelly's work, and The Alchemist to Mercury is therefore a major contribution to Kelly's readership and to literary scholarship. The volume's first title poem, The Alchemist, first appeared long ago in Kelly's own little magazine Trobar, was reprinted in his Controversy of Poets anthology for Anchor Doubleday in the late '60s, and had long been generally unavailable. It is as exciting, fascinating, and affecting a poem as any of us will find in any era, with a clarity of image and urgency pulsing through every line. This volume of previously uncollected work is altogether stunning in its scope as it displays the precosity of Kelly's early work and plots its development toward his present stature as a giant of our literature.