Memory Gardens

by Robert Creeley

Poems explore a variety of themes including childhood, love, family, time, and the seasons

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1986

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

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although some of these poems didn't do much for me, the ones that did really made me stop and re-read them. A great book. An amazing poet.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

OUT


Within pitiless
indifference
things left
out.

* * *

HOTEL


It isn't in the world of
fragile relationships

or memories, nothing
you could have brought with you.

It's snowing in Toronto.
It's four-thirty, a winter evening,

and the tv looks like a faded
hailstorm. The people

you know are down the hall,
maybe, but you're tired,

you're alone, and that's happy.
Give up and lie down.

* * *

ECHO


Pushing out from
this insistent

time makes
all of it

empty, again
memory.

* * *

VISION


Think of the size of it,
so big, if you could remember
what it was or where.

* * *

THE ROCK


Shaking hands again
from place of age,
out to the one

is walking down
the garden path
to be as all reunited.

* * *

GO


Push that little
thing up and the
other right down.
It'll work.

* * *

FOR PEN


Lady moon
light white
flowers open
in sweet silence.

* * *

EDGE


Edge of place
put on between

its proposed
place in

time
and space.

* * *

MEMORIES


Hello, duck,
in yellow

cloth stuffed from
inside out,

little
pillow.

* * *

ECHO


Back in time
for supper
when the lights

* * *

FOR TED BERRIGAN


After, size of place
you'd filled
in suddenly empties
world all too apparent

and as if New England
shrank, grew physically
smaller like Connecticut,
Vermont - all the little

things otherwise unattended
so made real by you,
things to do today,
left empty, waiting

sadly for no one
will come again now.
It's all moved inside,
all that dear world

in mind for forever,
as long as one walks
and talks here,
thinking of you.

* * *

HANDS


Reaching out to shake,
take, the hand,

hands, take in
hand hands.

* * *

MEMORY GARDENS


Had gone up to
down or across dis-
placed eagerly
unwitting hoped for

mother's place in time
for supper just
to say anything
to her again one

simple clarity her
unstuck glued
deadness emptied
into vagueness hair

remember wisp that
smile like half
her eyes brown eyes
her thinning arms

could life her
in my arms so
hold to her so
take her in my arms.

* * *

SUPPER


Time's more than
twilight mother at
the kitchen table over
meal the boiled potatoes
Theresa's cooked with meat.

* * *

KNOCK KNOCK


Say nothing
to it.
Push it away.
Don't answer.

Be grey,
oblique presence.
Be nothing
there.

If it speaks
to you, it
only wants
you for itself

and it has
more than you,
much
more.

* * *

LANGUAGE


Are all your
preoccupations un-

civil, insistent
caviling, mis-

taken dis-
criminating?

[Pachyderm Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Creeley's MEMORY GARDENS leaves the reader much to remember, much worth remebering, and much about the physical process of memory itself which remains to be pondered and is well worth pondering in this collection.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this book and I feel that I am being generous in granting it two stars. I read Creeley before, long ago, and I have several of his books. His name is an important one in poetry. I didn't enjoy the first book that I picked up at all. It was old, he was young, so I put it back on the shelf and got this later work. It, too, is mediocre, mundane, bland. My poetry is better, I feel. I didn't find much in this volume that I liked at all, that made me think or took me to another place.

Back on the shelf it goes. Perhaps with a few more years, one of us will have changed.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 C913m 1986