Collected Poems
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply felt but largely invisible. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo’s aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light the highly original voice that was operating at an increasing remove from the currents of the time. From a poetics associated with Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to an ever more contemplative, deeply visionary poetics similar in sensibility to Zen and Dante, William Blake and St. John of the Cross, this collection shows how Ceravolo’s poetry takes on a direct, quiet lyricism: intensely dedicated to the natural and spiritual life of the individual. As Ron Silliman notes, Ceravolo’s later work reveals him to be “one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation.” Many new pieces, including the masterful long poem “The Hellgate,” are published here for the first time. This volume is a landmark edition for American poetry, and includes an introduction by David Lehman.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fascinating, unwieldy, and sometimes sublime, this first collected for the New Jersey based Ceravolo (1934-88) reveals a poet wilder and potentially far more popular than the one all but a few strong admirers know. A friend of the New York School poets whose work (especially that of Ted Berrigan) his early writings resemble, Ceravolo came into his own with Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (1969), where modernist dislocations receded in favor of childlike wonder at children, weather, buildings, and sex: "Daytime is not a brain,/ Living is not a cricket's song./ Why does light diffuse/ As earth turns away from the sun?" Ceravolo's many odes, prayers and exclamations seem very in tune with the late 1960s, yet also in touch with a timeless, excited mysticism: "Now I see that love/ is the only clarity I feared." Ceravolo continued in these exalted modes through the exciting and long obscure Millenium Dust (1982) and into the massive, previously unpublished Mad Angels, where his impatience, and lack of an audience, can seem all too primitive, really naive: "Soothe me, O spirit!/ in the intestines of creation/ until I breathe right, sing right." This big book will spark new interest; it might even attract fans of Rumi, or of the Beats.
