Customer Reviews

The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker (Works By One Author)

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It still amazes me that more people who love poetry don't know about the revolutionary, elegant, deceptively simple, simply deceptive, American work of Lorine Niedecker, a quasi-member of the Objectivist movement and a unqiue and solitary figure. A woman writer invested in so many American traditions -- Emily Dickinson's hermetic sensibility, William Carlos Williams' love of the ordinary -- Niedecker is truly one of the great poets of the century. I don't think you'll regret buying this book -- though you'll probably end up complaining, as I do daily, about the lack of a Collected Poems as yet in print.

This is a GREAT book. She lived quietly out in the midwest somewhere, had a media-free, you-might-say-humdrum, but real and normal life, but quietly chiselled TRUTH into her poetry, maybe it should be truth with a small t, because it is all so personal, humble, but above all genuine, so that eventually it is heavy with something. I have loved and returned to her poetry for close to 20 years now, its anti-histrionic quality bringing me home the simple fact of my own being, my fragility in time and my singularity. One of those great women, like Frida Kahlo and Diane Arbus, who made a dent in my being.

This intriguing collection of poems has more depth, subtlety and grace than you might expect from a 20th century American poet from Wisconsin. Niedecker is an astute observer of her surroundings, often remembering the ponds and rivers of her youth and early adulthood. These short poems are not small in depth, only in word count, often containing the grace and complexity of haiku with image juxtapositions conveying multiple meanings.

Wonderful, easy to read works that will linger long in memory. Highly recommended.