On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay [Hardcover]

Robert Creeley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2006

Robert Creeley, one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment--a postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. When Robert Creeley died in March 2005, he was working on what was to be his final book of poetry. In addition to more than thirty new poems, many touching on the twin themes of memory and presence, this moving collection includes the text of the last paper Creeley gave--an essay exploring the late verse of Walt Whitman. Together, the essay and the poems are a retrospective on aging and the resilience of memory that includes tender elegies to old friends, the settling of old scores, and reflective poems on mortality and its influence on his craft. On Earth reminds us what has made Robert Creeley one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Creeley, who died last year at 78, is among the American masters born in the 1920s, a generation that includes John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich. This slim volume, filled out with the cogent essay "Reflections on Whitman in Age," presents 31 poems of varying quality, from bad to sublime, and is a fitting final volume for a poet of relentless experimentation and major achievement. A jingly piece of antiwar propaganda, "Help!" seems specifically designed for those who aren't regular readers of verse, while "Caves," the longest poem in the volume, meanders. But in addresses to poets like John Wieners, Paul Blackburn and Ed Dorn, Creeley attains a loose intimacy that feels like friendship, and the final "Valentine for You," here in its entirety, is likely to be as associated with Creeley as "Crossing the Bar" is with Tennyson: "Where from, where to/ the thought to do—// Where with, whereby/ the means themselves now lie—// Wherefor, wherein/ such hopes of reconciling heaven// Even the way is changed/ without you, even the day." (Apr.)
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From Booklist

Robert Creeley was clearly preoccupied with aging, regret, and acceptance while working on this final book before his death, in March 2005. With his signature straightforward style, he questions beliefs about memory, time, and living in the present. Buddhists have suggested that young people should tune into the aging and vice versa in order to accept life's natural cycle. Creeley evidently felt similarly when he asked a class to express their feelings about old people. After considering their comments on smelliness and ramblings, he wanted to tell them "you will all grow old, at least if you have any luck. To be human has growing old at its end." Based on the themes and mood of the poems in this collection, Creeley seemed to have reached a level of clarity and peace about his past, present, and inevitable departure. His poems speak with the understated power readers have come to expect from him, and this collection is a fitting good-bye from a poet whose work will surely live on. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 100 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520247914
• ISBN-13: 978-0520247918
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,326,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'To be human has growing old at its end', May 4, 2006

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay (Hardcover)

Robert Creeley died last year, an event he expected and understood as well as any poet ever has. This collection of his last writings is a treasure to those of us who fell under his inspiring and straightforward spell of writing: it is an apt epitaph to a man whose poems caressed the human condition and accepted death as a final stanza to life.

Creeley embraced Buddhism in its vision of the panoply of existence. His works reflect his need to address aging as part of living, the importance of memory in the persistence of those departed: his poems have always included elegies to old friends that embody his perception of the life process. In 'For Ric, who Loved the World' he sighs 'The sounds/ of his particular/ music echoing,/ stay in the soft/ air months after/ all's gone to/ grass, to lengthening/ shadows, to slanting/ sun on shifting water,/ to the late light's edges/ through tall trees -/ despite the mind's/ still useless,/ ponderous thought.'

Included in this poignant volume is the text of an essay exploring the late verse of Walt Whitman. It is a fitting tribute to poets of the past and a warm tie to those for whom Robert Creeley was one of the truly affectionately respected poets of our country. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, May 06