New Collected Poems Book

While Oppen's poems might at first appear to be thorny, opaque, elliptical to the point of incomprehensibility, and ultra-modernist - all of which qualities can be attractive or repellent depending on the reader and his/her relationship to poetry - once their potentially off-putting crust is broken with a clean whack of the reader's brain, they reveal themselves to be extremely readable, embodying a remarkable marriage of clear vision, clear thought, exquisite aesthetics, and the intensified essence of a life lived with all-around integrity and engagement. Here is a man who could build boats and could bring the same sense of watertight craft to the building of poems without those poems becoming fussy or over-crafted or academic, and without sacrificing pure art in the process. Oppen was a consummate artist and his poems are literally alive with his focused life; and like so many fascinating lives, they are indefinable, partially private, partially products of a community, and are decidedly not easy. I wouldn't want them any other way... Reading these poems with the focus they require can have an actual clarifying effect on the mind and eyes, a real physical sensation that helps one see deeper and clearer into the "thingness" of things; for Oppen had no patience with the theoretical or the metaphysical or the murky netherworlds of the Jungian unconscious. Oppen's poetry is all about things, and, as poetry should be, it's also all about words.