Seedings and Other Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780811213318)

Jerome Rothenberg holds a premier place in the American avant-garde. The poems in Seedings, his newest collection, leap across history. Past and future become entwined, and the intricate paths reaching from one century and one millennium into another double back into timelessness ("as the twentieth century winds down/the nineteenth century begins/again"). The long title poem that opens this fin-de-siecle gathering is, appropriately, a celebration of poets and friends--such as Robert Duncan, George Oppen, and Paul Blackburn--who have entered what Rothenberg calls "a Paradise of Poets." "Seedings" is followed by four other sections, "Improvisations" is a series of high-energy poems in a mode of open writing characteristic of much of the poet's experimental work, while "Twentieth Century Unlimited" is an assemblage of travel poems and personal observations. "An Oracle for Delfi" revisits and sees anew a classical landscape long the inheritance of Western poets. A final sequence, "14 Stations," joins the concise verbal techniques of gematria (traditional Hebrew numerology) with the stark agonies of the Holocaust last explored by Rothenberg in Khurbn & Other Poems (1989).

Author: Jerome Rothenberg
ISBN-10: 0811213315
ISBN-13: 9780811213318
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 09/17/1996
Pages: 116
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.31lbs
Size: 7.94h x 5.22w x 0.37d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/26/1996 pg. 94
Booklist 09/15/1996 pg. 205
Library Journal 10/01/1996 pg. 83