Keith Waldrop - Böcker

This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences - "Shipwreck in Haven," "Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruvius" - in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.

Not exactly a novel and not really a poem, though it contains some verses and is not without characters, this work describes a man late in life who has been around and who's thought about what he has seen and heard. He is a unique geezer, whose trains of thought seem often on tracks without station or schedule.

A rich array of materials coalesce here into a vibrant portrait, in text and image, of two extraordinary artists and collaborators. For nearly sixty years, the Waldrops have influenced multiple generations of writers through their own poetry and fiction, translations, teaching, and their press, Burning Deck, which published some of the most influential authors of late-twentieth-century avant-garde literature. This collection seeks to illustrate the many ways in which the Waldrops have expanded the possibilities of bookcraft, art, community, and literature.