As Ever
Selected Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
This collection of Joanne Kyger's work reveals her as one of the major experimenters, hybridizers, and visionaries of poetry. Kyger is a poet of place, with a strong voice-delicate, graceful, and never wasteful; her poems explore themes of friendship, love, community, and morality and draw on Native American myth as well as Asian religion and philosophy. Kyger's love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consciousness-expansion and lesson, but always in the realm of the everyday. Edited with a foreword by Michael Rothenberg, and with an introduction by poet David Meltzer, this book is a marvelous overview of a wonderfully challenging and important poet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Just a little bit/ does the magic" writes Kyger halfway into her belated, ecstatic debut on the national stage with a large house. Sharing, with poets such as Philip Whalen and David Meltzer, a love of William Carlos Williams and Zen Buddhism, Kyger patiently and confidently navigates her present-tense diarist lyric as it moves across the page. A Bolinas neighbor of Richard Brautigan, she's capable of hippie dizziness that soars to populist heights: "Everybody practices magic/ whether they know it or not/ Oh I'm worn out/ just watching the cats/ lick their fur." But where her more beat-influenced colleagues would compensate for their lighter moments with wrenching despair, Kyger opts instead for level-headed surprises: "Man get relaxed/ Woman get permanent." Though formalists may object to her apparent artlessness, Kyger's obsession for detail draws on a passionate intelligence that is seldom trivial. In fact, it's her genius for moment-by-moment description that provokes her to modesty, in opposition to the completist's mania: "But why/ does he want to do that, write down/ all the road signs from here/ to the east coast." While many writers have spoken of their work as one continuous project, Kyger's oeuvre actually holds together in this selection from her 20-plus books; throughout, her prosody, both aural and visual, is pitch perfect.
