This new, compact Selected Poems offers for the first time a balanced survey of Robert Creeley's entire sixty years of poetic accomplishment. It showcases the works that made him one of the most beloved and significant writers of the past century while inviting a new recognition of his enduring commitments, fluency, and power....

If youth asks the mirror, "Am I the fairest?" then age, in Robert Creeley's skillful, ironic, and tender voice asks, "Do you remember me?" And the poems of LIFE & DEATH are the mirror's answers--a collage of recollection and salvage, a gathering-in before winter's night....

"Robert Creeley has created a noble life body of poetry that extends the work of predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson and that provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness."—Allen Ginsberg

If I were writing this was the last book of poems completed by Robert Creeley and published during his lifetime (New Directions, 2003). The words that he wrote to describe this book are oddly prophetic: "Age brings experience, not wisdom; age makes time actual—each day another—until there is no more. These poems have been my company, my solace, my feelings, my heart. When they cannot speak it will all be silence." Though Creeley died in 2005, his poems are not silent—they vibrantly continue to embrace life while acknowledging, with no self-pity, the inevitability of death. The message (as he always ended his letters) is "Onward!"...