The Island

by Robert Creeley

"The Island", the author's first novel, tells the story of the shattering of a man's retreat. Written in a piercing, bone-spare style of prose. A man is utterly revealed through the relentless progress of a situation critical, eventually, to the balance of his mind.

Genres: Fiction

190 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 1963

About the author

Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo, and lived in Waldoboro, Maine, Buffalo, New York and Providence, Rhode Island, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and was much beloved as a generous presence in many poets' lives.

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much a story written at the tail end of a fashion -- American writers struggling with their personal problems while living in a Europe that doesn't understand them and doesn't care a whole lot about them. All that started, of course, around 1920, and Creeley wrote this, or copyrighted it, in 1963. The story was an old one by then, and was exhausted, and this often feels exhausted.

I think most would come to this now because of a love of Creeley's poems, which I did. And the strengths of this novel, its wonderful small moments, almost set pieces, have something of Creeley's poems. Even the prose, from time to time, will get some of that tension and word play that is in the poems. It felt very good when those moments were around.

Much of the internal tension between the characters didn't convince me, or felt too easy. But sometimes it worked well, including the fabulous moment at the end where the protagonist is trying to picture his wife's death, which he has convinced himself has just happened. It has the feel of those tragic personal narratives we all construct in moments of self-pity -- and Creeley is just great at it here at the end of the book. And then he resolves it wonderfully. End of book!

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

yeah..fuck; best read in the early dawn.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

unbearably sad. creeley's sentence structure is sometimes disorienting, for me. good though.