“Poetry,” Michael McClure has said, “is not a system but is real events spoken of, or happening, in sounds.” And for thirty years, whether in his early “Dionysian” lyrics or his evolving “bio-alchemical” wisdom, his work has shown a ferocious energy and driving physicality. A poet of and for our time, his own formal structures—the shape of his poems and his highly charged breath-line—nevertheless look back to the classics, to the Provençal troubadours, and to the Romantic verse of Blake, Keats, and Shelley. McClure’s Selected Poems is the first major retrospective collection of a poet and Obie-winning playwright associated with the San Francisco Renaissance from its start as well as the early Beat movement. The poems in the book, chosen by McClure himself, hold the undiminished force of three decades’ work distilled. Included in Selected Poems are poems and long passages from nine of the author’s earlier collections.
- ISBN10 0811209512
- ISBN13 9780811209519
- Publish Date 18 February 1987
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 20 August 2004
- Publish Country US
- Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Format Paperback
- Pages 132
- Language English