It is no exaggeration to suggest that Robert Kelly may well be
America's most prolific poet, and certainly one of the most singular and
ceaselessly innovative poets the country produced in the 2nd part of
the past century. To date, he has written more than 70 books of poetry
and fiction - books that reveal a breathtaking range, from freshly
minted trobar clus and contemporized sonnet forms, to epic-length
narratives and non-narratives - such as Axon Dendron Tree, The Common
Shore, The Loom, or the first two installments of a recent trilogy, Fire
Exit & Uncertainties. Just as compelling are the volumes of shorter
lyric forms, such as Finding the Measure, Songs I-XXX, Not this Island
Music, and Lapis, or his even more experimental work, such as Sentence,
The Flowers of Unceasing Coincidence, or his writing-through of
Shelley's poem, Mont Blanc. The deeper unity of the work is unavoidably
present in the voice that underlies the multiplicity of forms. As Guy
Davenport wrote: "A Kelly poem is a Kelly poem. It dances in his way,
sings in his intonations, insisting on its style. No American poet
except perhaps Wallace Stevens has his sense of balance in a line. [...]
Kelly has nothing to hide: the untiltable balance is there to begin
with." Less visible than the poetry, but certainly no less important,
incisive, worth preserving & circulating anew, are the trove of
essayistic materials disseminated throughout numerous small & not so
small magazines of the second-half of the 20th C. The out-of-print 1971
In Time was Kelly's sole published book of essays properly speaking,
even though he has been writing on his (& others') poetry &
poetics since the early 60s. Long over-due, the present volume, A Voice
Full of Cities, collects for the first time Kelly's essays, statements,
& other writings on poetry & poetics, making available a vast
array of difficult to obtain works. The editors' aim was to insure that -
in Robert Kelly's own words - "the fifty years of thinking around the
fifty years of making won't get lost, and making and thinking will be
seen as one thing."
Paperback book in very good condition.