Reviews for Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth

The average rating for Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-03 00:00:00 Charles Groves Good stuff, for the most part. The early experimental poetry doesn't interest me much, but around "The Phoenix and the Tortious" he starts to feel sort of like Du Fu writing in English, with such clean, clear, nimble language. I'm not sure if I find Rexroth very interesting as a thinker and his sort of transcendent eroticism never felt quite right to me, but he's a very pleasant poet to read. The only thing is--I wish I had been able to buy the complete poems instead of this one! I didn't realize this stopped so early in his career, especially since the influence from Chinese poetry seemed to become stronger as he aged. I may actually enjoy Rexroth more as a translator than a poet (his translations from the Greek, Chinese, and Japanese are some of the best I've read), but I'm still glad I picked this up.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-15 00:00:00 Duke Trana 3.5 stars. I don't think these poems are aging all that well. One advantage they possess is that they are written in lucid language with very little purple prose and very few dated linguistic mannerisms. Rexroth's love of poetries of the past taught him something about what to avoid in his own. His work as a translator served him well in his vocation as a poet. On the negative side, Rexroth can dash off extremely boring poems. Some of the poems seem to have too much of the personal and not enough of the universal. Some of the poems make me wince because of the archaic stances on mores. Turning to his Lorca poem just now, "Blood and Sand," I am reminded of why I find much of his poetry so distasteful A few sample, bad lines: "They kept you pregnant, Federico, / With the chemicals of their unlust, / With their ugly, devouring sperm, / With their pustulant, corrosive blood." Okay. That's a lot of adjectives. And why bring innocent sperm into it and asperse it? There are some striking poems in the collection, the ones you might have seen anthologized sometime in the very distant past. If you don't mind the hot air of Rexroth's bloviations in your face and are patient, you might find them in here.