The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound.—William Carlos Williams"It is a study, how Creeley lands syntax down the alley, and his vocabulary-pure English-to hit meters and rhymes all of which are spares and strikes."—Charles Olson"Robert Creeley has created a noble body of poetry that extends the work of his predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson, and provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness."—Allen Ginsberg"His succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond." —John Ashbery"Robert Creeley was one of the great giants of 20th Century American poetry. This collection is his monument." —Paul Auster"American poetry is unimaginable and, happily, unknowable without Creeley."—Andrei Codrescu, author of it was today: new poems"Creeley is a touchstone for me-a measure of what poetry is. He is a genius of the sensorium as Kerouac was and a master of the ear as is Miles Davis. He is a carver in space like Van Gogh."—Michael McClure"There is no poetry more vivid, immediate, or telling than Robert Creeley's. His Collected Poems extends the achievement of Dickinson, Whitman, and Williams into postwar America. Creeley's excavation of particular words, images, and sentiments resonate beyond the pages of this book into the fabric of everyday life. This is American invention at its best, as necessary as the air we breathe and the ground we walk on."—Charles Bernstein"'It isn't what a poet says that counts as a work of art,' William Carlos Williams once wrote, 'it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.' I can't think of another contemporary poet whose acute sensitivity to the particular event of making (and in poetry making includes breaking) each written line