White Spaces

by Paul Auster

“Magnificent poetry; dark, severe, even harsh―yet pulsating with life.” ―John Ashbery White Spaces gathers the poetry and prose of Paul Auster from various small-press books issued throughout the seventies. These early poetic works are crucial for understanding the evolution of Auster’s writing. Taut, lyrical, and always informed by a powerful and subtle music, his poems begin with basics―a swallow’s egg, stones, roots, thistle, “the glacial rose”―and push language to the breaking point. As Robert Creeley wrote, “The enduring power of these early poems is their moving address to a world all too elusive, too fragmented, and too bitterly transient.” Auster’s poems are grounded in a physical utterance that is at once an exploration of the mind and of the world. This collection begins with compact verse fragments from Spokes (originally published in Poetry, 1971) and goes through Auster’s marvelous later collections including Wall Writing (The Figures, 1976), Facing the Music (Parenthese, 1979), and White Spaces (Station Hill, 1980).

Genres: Poetry

30 pages, paperback

First published June 1, 1980

About the author

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024.

Reviews

[Molly ripa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Timeless

[Celine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ontologically driven oeuvre
Samuel Beckett watt coded
S tier white male poetry

[jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I happen to be speaking at this moment, it is only because I hope to find a way of going along, of running parallel to everything else that is going along, and so begin to find a way of filling the silence without breaking it.

I did not expect to like this as much as I did, as in, I got this in Portland with Gabi (@ Daedalus books a place my gut says I will return to) and the joke was very much that it had been an abrasive week in a very white space.

I stood, perhaps, / beside where you/ might have been. I dragged / everything / home to the other world

I have been thinking (and trying very hard to write about lol) the spoken / unspeakable with substance, and the resignation in that, in not so much to choose silence but to speak anyway. I've just sent off those words (hii esther), and am thinking I will not try my hand at them again, for a while, maybe ever, or more likely they will revisit me in a new way. But I know what they feel like, and I found that in White Spaces.

And we know that earth / will never yield / a word / small enough to hold us.... We therefore / will be named / by all that we are not.

and to end on posture!:

The eye / does not will / what enters it: it must always refuse / to refuse.

[Peycho Kanev]

Narrative

Because what happens will never happen,
and because what has happened
endlessly happens again,
we are as we were, everything
has changed in us, if we speak
of the world
it is only to leave the world
unsaid. Early winter: the yellow apples still
unfallen
in a naked tree, the tracks
of invisible deer
in the first snow, and then the snow
that does not stop. We repent
of nothing. As if we could stand
in this light. As if we could stand in the silence
of this single moment
of light.

[Taylor]

it was fine

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

To remain in the realm of the naked eye, as happy as I am at this moment. And if this is too much to ask, then to be granted the memory of it, a way of returning to it in the darkness of the night that will surely engulf me again. Never to be anywhere but here. And the immense journey through space that continues. Everywhere, as if each place were here. And the snow falling endlessly in the winter night.

[Evelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A selection of the author’s early poetry and some prose on a variety of subjects including nature and humanity. A few poems contain some interesting imagery. However, the majority are pedestrian, and symbolic. If one fails to grasp the symbolism one is lost, and finds the verbiage to be of little meaning.

[Bruno · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not care for this at all. There would occasionally be an image or two that would motivate me to continue reading just because it was so short, but I really didn't care about anything here. No one single poem that gripped me in a significant way. Veryyy abstract, nothign really that you can grab and hold onto. I don't know man.

[Goldfinch Bolton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another reviewer called it "s tier white man poetry" and I think that's a good summation!

Kinda like finding out that the deli an extra door down that looks generic and unassuming has a really good egg and cheese on a roll for like $2.50? It's not life changing but it could be morning changing :)

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, mystical early poems by Auster.

[Caio Leal · Rating 5 out of 5]

filho da puta

[Paul Besley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me. Found it very difficult to follow both the poetry and prose.

[T Arta · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorites

[Sofie · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first thirty minutes of reading: I recite the poems to myself, no one listening, pop music heard from the street.
The next time I dive into the poems, I am in an udon restaurant, so, well, not reading aloud. But I so enjoy it, especially after two days of loud voices, constantly in my ear. I enjoy it even as I grasp very little (as it is with me and poetry). A few stood out, they spoke to me, but why? I cannot tell you.