Collected Poems (Hardcover)

by Paul Auster (Author), The Overlook Press (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Before embarking as a novelist, young Paul Auster (City of Glass) published poetry in a variety of small journals and magazines. This handy volume collects all his verse from the late 1960s through 1980. It's poetry very much of its period, oriented toward French mid-century thought and modes. A pale, defeated imagism presides, as visions of whiteness and woundedness unspool from line to line. Things vanish out of the world (a key section is called "Disappearances") and hands clench onto the empty space where they've been. Many of the poems treat the paradoxes of perception and epistemology: "He is alive, and therefore he is nothing/ but what drowns in the fathomless hole/ of his eye,// and what he sees/ is all that he is not." The scholar Norman Finkelstein provides an illuminating introduction, tracing connections between allusions in the poetry and actual events in the young Auster's life, such as the collapse of his parents' marriage and his attendance at riot-torn late '60s Columbia University. To add heft to the slim book, a number of Auster's translations from the French are included, mostly of the surrealist communist poets of a previous era (Breton, Tzara, Eluard) who attained a new popularity when the events of May '68 made them, literally, poster boys for the New Left in Paris. As a translator, Auster is always effective when he employs a small vocabulary, and his work on Tzara is genuinely impressive: "I know I carry the song in me and I am not afraid/ I carry death and if I die it is death." Otherwise Collected Poems remains a curiosity, a tantalizing look at the work of a poet whose breakthrough led him away from line breaks and into the actions of prose.
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From Booklist
The source of the elegant metaphysics that shape Auster's distinctive fiction, from his seminal New York Trilogy to his most recent riddling tale, Oracle Night [BKL O 1 03], is found in his earliest works, spare and philosophical poems. Auster published six collections between 1974 and 1980, and selections from each, as well as some of his translations of the French poets who have so deeply influenced him, including Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, and Jacques Dupin, are gathered here to form a remarkably meditative volume. Auster's exquisitely balanced poems are theorems postulating the nature of being, equations that seek to define the relationship between consciousness and matter, language and experience. He begins with some basics--stone, seed, roots, the beam of a watchful eye, the blank page of a desert landscape--and slowly fills this subtly biblical mindscape with musings on the puzzles of existence, our elemental struggles with adversity both natural and designed by humankind, and the mysteries of the self and of love. Auster's collected poems are crucial to his ravishing oeuvre. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover (January 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585674044
• ISBN-13: 978-1585674046
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,059,230 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Austere Auster, June 27, 2006

By	My Uncle Stu (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

I've enjoyed all that I've read of Paul Auster's fiction and essays, so I was eager to delve into his poetry. Not surprisingly to anyone whose read his prose, much of Auster's poetry focuses on the landscape of chance. The drifts of collected coincidence within the stochastic that culminate in meaning. It's the struggle to resist chance without embrcing fate. All the while, one feels from Auster a desperate desire to stand outside it all, though he is acutely aware of the paradox within that desire. It is the abstract laboring to be concrete. Shrodinger's Poet.

"Collected Poems" starts with poetry from the early seventies, when Auster was in his early twenties. They are bleak and gloomy in tone and yet do have a lyrical musical tone that creates some forward momentum. They made me think of some of the kids I knew in college, the front-row philosophy majors that were a little lost in their own heads.

From 1970's "Spoke," (11):

To see is this other torture, atoned for
In the pain of being seen: the spoken,
The seen, contained in the refusal
To speak, and the seed of a single voice,
Buried in a random stone.
My lies have never belonged to me.


We then move forward in time to the mid and late seventies, weightier ruminations such as "Disappearances," "Fragments from Cold," and "Facing the Music."

From "Fragments from Cold:"

Because we go blind
in the day that goes out with us,
and because we have seen out breath
cloud
the mirror of air;
the eye of the air will open
on nothing but the word
we renounce: winter
will have been a place
of ripeness.

We who become the dead
of another life than ours.


We then step back in time and read some of Auster's translations of the French poets who were his early influences. Then some unpublished "Notes From a Composition Book" from 1967, a succession of statements attempting to construct a philosophy on reality, epistemology, the nature of language, art, and so on. For example, number 10: "The eye sees the world in flux. The word is an attempt to arrest the flow, to stabilize it. And yet we persist in trying to translate experience in language. Hence poetry, hence the utterances of daily life. This is the faith that prevents universal despair- and also causes it." It ends on number 13, with the conclusion that if words fail him, he is nothing.

A little self-indulgent and pretentious at times, but that goes with the territory. Overall much of it is beautiful writing and all of it is well worth reading. This early work also functions as the back-story, helping me appreciate Auster's prose in a deeper way.

Recommended, thumbs up, if you are an Auster fan it should be mandatory.