"So There: Poems 1976-1983" combines three earlier collections of Robe Creeley's work published by New Directions: "Hello, A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976" (published 1978); "Later" (1979); and "Mirrors" (1983). This first gathering of the poet's later work continues but also stands in contrast to his early poems as presented in the monumental "Collected Poems 1945-1975" (University of California Press, 1982). Few poets have so clear a demarcation of their work. In 1976 Creeley set off to visit nine countries in the Far East, to explore his sense of self in a foreign landscape. He found not only a "company" of fellow beings but also a transformed sense of life and subsequently a new family. He sees today that these three books in a single volume emphasize the "determined change in my life they are the issue of." They record a watershed period when Creeley "moved beyond his early influences to become a unique master" (Publishers Weekly about "Mirrors"). In the essay "Old Poetry," the preface to "So There," Creeley looks back in "the work done" and the work to do: "Stay busy seems to be it." Stating it another way, fellow poet Caroline Kizer wrote that a "characteristic aspect of [Creeley's] genius is the way he gives substance to our ephemeral events: the events, which in accretion, make up our lives" (Washington Post Book World). Creeley would echo another master: "As Pound put it most succinctly, 'one is working on the life vouchsafed...' Here is my own evidence." "So There" records the rites of passage of his own particular life, and in its three volumes, Creeley writes with humility, maturity, and humane intelligence. Truly, as Hugh Kenner said, "he is one of the very few contemporaries with whom is it essential to keep in contact."
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Creeley puts down his perceptions but avoids the all-too Western tendency of drawing conclusions. And by not doing so, the poet is able to become one with this foreign environment. What's refreshing is this connection springs not from philosophic ruminations, which in our culture are all-too-often tied into knots with polysyllabic words, but from just being open to existence. -- Home News Tribune, 25 April 1999
His influence on contemporary American poetry has probably been more deeply felt than that of any other writer of his generation. -- Terry Southern, The New York Times Book Review
The slippage between wandering and wondering, Creeley's engagement with accident and memory, achieves its most compelling articulation in...So There. -- Oyster Boy Review, Miles Efron, Summer 2000
His influence on contemporary American poetry has probably been more deeply felt than that of any other writer of his generation. -- Terry Southern, The New York Times Book Review
The slippage between wandering and wondering, Creeley's engagement with accident and memory, achieves its most compelling articulation in...So There. -- Oyster Boy Review, Miles Efron, Summer 2000
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