Ground Work: Before the War
by Robert Duncan
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Robert Duncan's Groundwork, the American poet's unparalleled final masterpiece, is now available in a single volume.I am speaking now of the Dream in which America sleeps, the New World, moaning, floundering, in three hundred years of invasions, our own history out of Europe and enslaved Africa.Robert Duncan, from GroundworkRobert Duncan has been widely venerated as one of America's most essential poets: Allen Ginsberg described his poetry as "rapturous wonderings of inspiration," Gwendolyn show more Brooks called it "a subtle spice," and Susan Howe pointed to Duncan as "my precursor father," Lawrence Ferlinghetti said he "had the finest ear this side of Dante," and Robert Creeley called him "the magister, the singular Master of the Dance."Now Duncan's magnum opus, Groundwork, is available in one groundbreaking edition. The first volume, Groundwork I: Before the War, was published in 1984, after a fifteen-year publishing silence, and received immediate acclaim: it was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won the first National Poetry Award for Duncan's "lifetime devotion to the art of poetry and his grand achievement...." The second volume, Groundwork II: In the Dark, was published in February 1988, the month of Duncan's death. The internationally renowned poet Michael Palmer has written a marvelous introduction for this new edition, where "the singlemindedness of [Duncan's] life's work shows itself in the confident energy of every line" (Voice Literary Supplement). show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Difficult and exploratory, this is an interesting work to explore, but probably not for the casual reader. Duncan's experimentations in form and subjectmatter are complex and wandering, but the language is gracefully dealt, and worth wandering through.
I had not been exposed to Duncan before reading this work. I really enjoyed his work. His work is deep and fluid, I especially enjoyed his poems on the Vietnam war, he really is one of the master poets.
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42+ Works 691 Members
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