Collected Poems

Joseph Ceravolo, Rosemary Ceravolo, Parker Smathers, Rosemary Ceravolo, Parker Smathers

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780819573414
• eBook ISBN:
  9780819573421
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction by David Lehman
• Editor’s Note
• Transmigration Solo (1960–1965)
• Water: How Weather Feels the Cotton Hotels (1960)
• Fits of Dawn (1965)
• Sea Level (1964)
• Wild Flowers Out of Gas (1967)
• Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (1968)
• The Hellgate (1969–1975)
• Interior of the Poem (1971)
• INRI (1979)
• Millenium Dust (1982)
• Mad Angels (1976–1988)
• Indexes