Of Indigo and Saffron
New and Selected Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from A Fist Full, published in 1957, through Swirls in Asphalt, a new poem sequence, Of Indigo and Saffron is both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poems—grounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural world—chart a poetic landscape of utter originality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McClure has not departed from his center-justified, breath-based lines in a career that has spanned more than half a century. One of the readers at Allan Ginsberg's famed 1955 reading of "Howl" at San Francisco's Six Gallery, McClure, unlike Ginsberg, remains closely associated with that city, and with the varieties of 20th-century Zen and other Eastern religious practice that have emerged from it. Like Philip Whalen, Charles Bukowski, and Jim Morrison (to whom one section is dedicated), McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness: "The pain is/ CHILD'S MAGIC/ drunk on/ the vistas/ of weathered/ skin." But as with the world, one has to take the good with the bad: that is the only way in which poems like McClure's Ghost Tantra make any sense: "PLEASURE FEARS ME, FOOT ROSE, FOOT BREATH,/ BY BLAHHR MAKGROOOOOOO TARRR/ nowp tytath brooooooooooooooooooo." It's that deep-end quality that keeps generations of fans of Bukowski and Morrison from discovering McClure's work, but it's also what makes him a greater poet than either of them, as this summative volume, given a little indulgence, shows.
