Poetry
ISBN: 0-89924-109-3
Paper: $10.00 |
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Historically one recognizes a recurring pattern in the biography of genius. Robbins' originality is in his language -- his extraordinary vocabulary, ranging from the vulgar to the technical and esoteric, his lively and variable synatax, his ear for poetic sounds. But he is by no means merely a wordsmith, not a language poet; though he resorts at times to punning, he never does it for its own sake, and his aim is neither to shock nor astonish. Instead he levies on all the resources of the verbal imagination with great alacrity, aiming for richness of poetic experience, both his and the reader's, and what could be more gratifying?
-Hayden Carruth
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| "Robbins speaks from the time when the world was serious, from the place where it was knit of flesh and history. In addition to their organic (as in humus) stubbornness, these poems confront the thinning of our consciousness with agonized integrity. Woven through the urbattleground of the flesh and the captured words are luminous filaments of celebration, sensuality, wary abondonment. Robbins is a major poet, in an almost forgotten sense." -- Andrei Codrescu |
