On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay - Hardcover

"On Earth provides a kind of closure on a rich poetic life and brings us intimately in contact with the poet's final thoughts on the great theme of time and memory. Those of us who know Creeley may well repeat Whitman's lines in reading this volume: "Good-bye my Fancy!/Farewell dear mate, dear love!" - Michael Davidson "Robert Creeley has created a noble life 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"

Robert Creeley, one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth-century, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment - a postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. When Robert Creeley died in March 2005, he was working on what was to be his final book of poetry. In addition to more than thirty new poems, many touching on the twin themes of memory and presence, this moving collection includes the text of the last paper Creeley gave - an essay exploring the late verse of Walt Whitman. Together, the essay and the poems are a retrospective on aging and the resilience of memory that includes tender elegies to old friends, the settling of old scores, and reflective poems on mortality and its influence on his craft. "On Earth" reminds us what has made Robert Creeley one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.