Retrievals:
Uncollected & New Poems, 1955-2010
Jerome Rothenberg
180 pages perfectbound
$21.00
ISBN 978-1-881523-19-2
A central figure of both the "deep image" and ethnopoetics movements, and a pioneering experimentalist, Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over eighty collections of poems and ten volumes of translations and editor of nine ground-breaking anthologies. He here assembles, out of poems and plays unpublished or obscurely published, the first representation of the full trajectory of one of the most important careers in American poetry of the past fifty years.
"Jerome Rothenberg has done as much as anyone over the past half century to shake up received ideas of what poems ought to be like, by demonstrating or suggesting an endless profusion of other pathways, other shapes, other stances, other contexts: as if to say that it is always possible to begin over, to invent new rules for the most ancient of games, not once but over and over. Now to the rest of his poetry--a body of work still underrated, in part because his extraordinary work as editor and translator may at times have overshadowed it--is added this bonus: half a century of work previously uncollected, spilling out in profusion from the interstices of all the previous poetry and revealing multiple layers of exploration and invention. Here are baroque sonnets, gnostic hymns, language games, parables, elegies, conversations, landscapes inner and outer, dream poems, poems noisy and nearly silent, poems mournful and ecstatic and uproarious, poems in dialogue with other poems from the Bablyonians and Toltecs to today or the day after, by way of Oppian, Lorca, Pound, Duncan, Mac Low, and culminating in a starkly pared-down suite of Ikons & Altarpieces. Retrievals is the book of a life, and the book of an era."
- Geoffrey O'Brien, editor-in-chief, The Library of America