The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades

by George Starbuck, Kathryn Starbuck (Editor), Anthony Hecht (Foreword by)

Eighty-one poems spanning the career of the late George Starbuck, widely praised luminary of modern American verse.
Starbuck was known in his lifetime and is remembered today as a practitioner of verse remarkable for its pathos, intelligence, and wit. A master of American vernacular, sensitive to the rhythms of everyday speech, Starbuck was also a brilliant lyricist, at once erudite and irreverent. He addressed some of the most profound issues of his day with a playful ingenuity and a virtuosity of talent that Glyn Maxwell, poetry editor of the New Republic , writing in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry , calls a "veritable arsenal of strategies against the darkness."
Starbuck came to wide critical notice in 1960 with the publication of his first book, Bone Thoughts , which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. He published work regularly in the New Yorker and other major literary journals in the United States. His work was consistently recognized with awards, among them the Prix de Rome, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the Beth Hokin Prize, a Notable Book of the Year designation from the New York Times , the Lenore Marshall poetry prize, and an Aiken-Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award.
Grouped together by decades, the poems reveal Starbuck's developing genius. His technical agility and his singular voice are evident. As Anthony Hecht declares in his foreword, "I come to this posthumous collection with serene and justified confidence in finding enormous pleasure, astonishment, admiration, and genuine satisfaction. [This book] is a generous sampling of a profound poetic legacy, one for which readers ought to be deeply grateful."

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

from wikipedia: George Edwin Starbuck was an American poet of the neo-formalist school.

Starbuck's work is marked by clever rhymes, witty asides, and the fusing of Romantic themes with cynicism about modern life. For example, his book Bone Thoughts was published with half its pages blank, and he called his style of formalism "SLABS" (Standard Length And Breadth Sonnets. He was not widely appreciated in the mainstream culture during his lifetime, but two new collections of his poems have been published in the last few years, Poems Selected from Five Decades and Visible Ink, helping win him a wider audience.

Starbuck's best-known poems include "Tuolomne," "On an Urban Battlefield," and "Sonnet With a Different Letter At the End of Every Line."

Starbuck won the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry in 1993 and the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1960.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Works" didn't resound with me quite the way "Bone Thoughts" had. I imagine this is because there's more material in this book, which spans more of his career and so is more evened out. The lyricism is lovely in some of the poems, and the imaginative inventiveness was often found in my favorite works of this collection. To rhyme "uses" and "amaryllis" or "eyeballs" and "Bibles" is just wonderful. I didn't care as much for the SLABs, or the poetry as images, although I can appreciate the amount of work that went into them.

It's a shame that Starbuck died as young as he did, otherwise, I think more people would be introduced to him today because he likely would have had more to contribute, or at least have remained a fixture in American poetry longer.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Starbuck really did just drop off the face of the planet, nobody else here really? Can't figure that out.