Echoes

In his half-century of writing poems, Creeley has proven consistently that if contemplated intensely enough, any simple thing can grow complex. The shell game we call perception becomes far more important than anything it shows or hides, and the boundary between object and what evidences its existence grows ever finer. Creeley's latest collection continues to probe that line, particularly the sense that what we see echoes what we think. Midway through he interrupts himself to warn us that any intended "coherence or determining purpose...seems now absent." Not true, since the poems' very spareness and sheer density of abstraction indicate a single, underlying subject so integral that neither articulation of it nor escape from it seems possible. A stenographer of consciousness, Creeley uses shorthand to catch the "shreds of emptying presence" that are the lives we mean to assume. His encryptions of frustration and widening amazement are often thin contradictory braids, maddeningly ungenerous or seemingly simplistic. Yet they echo back what we invest in them and will risk whatever we will. For most collections.