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Selected Poems
In 1982 William Bronk won the American Book Award for his book Life New & Collected Poems . Since then, he has written seven additional books, and Sagetrieb has devoted an entire issue to his work. Bronk is unquestionably a major poet––utterly original, uncompromisingly abstract in content, and deeply sensuous in form. Michael Heller, in The New York Times Book Review , said Bronk’s poetry is “singularly persistent in its own investigation of how our deepest truths are those which are most unsayable.” This volume spans Bronk’s entire career, from his first book Light and Dark , to his most recent Some Words and The Mild Day (Talisman), which the Village Voice praised as “offering epigrammatic style, philosophical reverie, and haiku-like concision.” Selected Poems is an indispensable collection, containing the most compelling and the most popular of Bronk’s eloquent poems.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 4, 2010
My fondness for William Bronk's poetry and for this type of contemplative verse has deepened over the past few years. Now I see poets of this stripe writing something like meditations and have realized Bronk is in the company of Jack Gilbert, Charles Wright, and John Ashbery. One thing that explains my enthusiasm for him is a strong identification with what he writes. Sometimes reading him is like reading about myself, as if he writes inside my thought. In this way he reaches where I am or have been. He can hold up a poem as delicate as a dandelion yet which also contains an image and perspective as perfectly formed and spoken as the facets of precious stones. Yes, he writes that beautifully. Early in his career he wrote more formally structured and developed poetry. Near the end of his career the poems became more like the brief flash of lightning yet retain the same potency and complexity. Whether the poem is long and sturdy or gracefully lean, he addresses with equal thoughfulness such ideas as the sameness of humanity, classical myth, the meanings of love and desire, the emptiness of piety. And always each poem becomes a kernel so big it fills the mind.
November 15, 2009
A great survey of Bronk's work. His poems are metaphysical in the best possible way- intelligent and curious about the biggest themes. There's not much of the 'I went to the store today and had an epiphany' style of thing here; Bronk is more interested in collective experiences, thoughts and worries. If you read the poems in chronological order, you can follow his changing attitude to our ability to know, our connection with a transcendent order, our joys and sufferings. He obviously thought at length in his poems, whether fleshing his ideas out in longer forms or making extremely dense, apothegmatic statements. My favorite of the latter:
Who's There
We need to separate ourselves from ourselves
to be ourselves. All that pain and power:
that isn't us. All that busyness,
the alienation and hate, those love affairs.
Can't wait to re-read this, or to pick up his Collected Poems instead, and get the full experience.
Who's There
We need to separate ourselves from ourselves
to be ourselves. All that pain and power:
that isn't us. All that busyness,
the alienation and hate, those love affairs.
Can't wait to re-read this, or to pick up his Collected Poems instead, and get the full experience.
January 29, 2019
I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn't an anchor anywhere.
There isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.
but no: there isn't an anchor anywhere.
There isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.
March 8, 2025
Meh. Existentialism and poetry began to feel self-cancelling after the first half, for me. Then I just put it down after reading: "I know nothing about my life except/that (call it my life) it is all mysterious."
August 26, 2015
Reading Bronk's work can be meditative and introspective but there remains a constant sense of detachment. He has modernist influence, but the poems refuse to be within those parameters. Bronk is a writer who is name dropped in a lot of circles as being within the same lineage as a Robert Frost or a Wallace Stevens, but his style (which is oblique and abstract) doesn't seem to fit anywhere in a traditional American canon. His poems are also intuitively incongruous, they don't follow, begin or end in the way that you as a reader would expect. Part of the reason he isn't more appreciated is probably due to these elements. People tend to go to poetry as a way to immerse and to escape and to find clear raw emotion. In Bronk, you get metaphysical unease and complex juxtapositions.
This collection is a fantastic introduction to his work though and the poetry contained is selected by Henry Weinfield. It features a range of different lengths of poetry, different subject matters and covers the entirety of his long career as a writer. What was interesting is that Bronk chose not to be involved in the selection process and so the poems do not reflect the author's favorite pieces.
The preface of this collection notes that his writing has an "astonishing complexity" but also is equally simple in his language. The complexity stems from the way the poems address the reader and the ways in which the words tangle and make knots, especially if read out loud. They often contradict themselves, or have opposites. They are wistful but without purpose since sometimes the words are often not trying to establish a narrative, but rather to create a feeling or impression. For example the poem, "The mind's landscape on an early winter day", you get "perceived by being unperceived" which is a sort of dead end but as a reader you find a way to make sense of it within the context. His poems are like a written pareidolia.
"Seeds and survivals are scattered in all the flaws
of this raw day, even though they are perceived
by being unperceived until the mind
tugs at the senses to remind them. The mind says see."
The poem in its first few lines creates an existential unease in the environment and this is a constant theme of his work as a whole. Perception is limited, we see only what our mind allows us to see. The day is waiting to be filled with the unease of being alive, the raw day.
I always feel like there is an eternalism that exists throughout a lot of his poems. Time is a character and it slows down, gets faster, loses control and so on, in much the same way any other well drawn character is. A good illustration of this is in the poem "The Arts and Death: A fugue for Sidney Cox":
"Death dominates my mind. I
do not stop thinking how time will stop,
how time has stopped, does stop. Those dead-
their done time. Time does us in."
Time has stopped, will stop and does stop. Not only that but it finishes and finally ends us. Notice also how the poem sounds, it just doesn't ring or flow in the expected way. Often the poem is trying to describe as closely as possible a moment or two which in reality exists only for a matter of seconds, such as touching someone, or expressing the short burst of grief at the loss of someone close. The first of these, the touch:
"My hands explore your touch as though your touch
were reality and they explained it. Slow
to learn, they ask it to be explained again.
Again. Or as though they were not quite sure.
of the reality they meant to explain: here
they say, and this, this also, this.
Oh, the reality is this. To explain
is possible. Touch me. I Touch you"
There is a clumsiness in the language, it gives a good translation to the feelings you get in an intimate situation.
Similarly loss is difficult to explain and fully account for, particularly when it occurs in blotches, or bursts. It is repetitive, it is the same gaping hole, the same emptiness. The World is a great place for that expression:
"I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn't an anchor anywhere
There isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no
I thought you were: Oh no. The drift of the world"
This collection is a fantastic introduction to his work though and the poetry contained is selected by Henry Weinfield. It features a range of different lengths of poetry, different subject matters and covers the entirety of his long career as a writer. What was interesting is that Bronk chose not to be involved in the selection process and so the poems do not reflect the author's favorite pieces.
The preface of this collection notes that his writing has an "astonishing complexity" but also is equally simple in his language. The complexity stems from the way the poems address the reader and the ways in which the words tangle and make knots, especially if read out loud. They often contradict themselves, or have opposites. They are wistful but without purpose since sometimes the words are often not trying to establish a narrative, but rather to create a feeling or impression. For example the poem, "The mind's landscape on an early winter day", you get "perceived by being unperceived" which is a sort of dead end but as a reader you find a way to make sense of it within the context. His poems are like a written pareidolia.
"Seeds and survivals are scattered in all the flaws
of this raw day, even though they are perceived
by being unperceived until the mind
tugs at the senses to remind them. The mind says see."
The poem in its first few lines creates an existential unease in the environment and this is a constant theme of his work as a whole. Perception is limited, we see only what our mind allows us to see. The day is waiting to be filled with the unease of being alive, the raw day.
I always feel like there is an eternalism that exists throughout a lot of his poems. Time is a character and it slows down, gets faster, loses control and so on, in much the same way any other well drawn character is. A good illustration of this is in the poem "The Arts and Death: A fugue for Sidney Cox":
"Death dominates my mind. I
do not stop thinking how time will stop,
how time has stopped, does stop. Those dead-
their done time. Time does us in."
Time has stopped, will stop and does stop. Not only that but it finishes and finally ends us. Notice also how the poem sounds, it just doesn't ring or flow in the expected way. Often the poem is trying to describe as closely as possible a moment or two which in reality exists only for a matter of seconds, such as touching someone, or expressing the short burst of grief at the loss of someone close. The first of these, the touch:
"My hands explore your touch as though your touch
were reality and they explained it. Slow
to learn, they ask it to be explained again.
Again. Or as though they were not quite sure.
of the reality they meant to explain: here
they say, and this, this also, this.
Oh, the reality is this. To explain
is possible. Touch me. I Touch you"
There is a clumsiness in the language, it gives a good translation to the feelings you get in an intimate situation.
Similarly loss is difficult to explain and fully account for, particularly when it occurs in blotches, or bursts. It is repetitive, it is the same gaping hole, the same emptiness. The World is a great place for that expression:
"I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn't an anchor anywhere
There isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no
I thought you were: Oh no. The drift of the world"
October 14, 2025
A wonderful collection. Will add Bronk to my list of poets that writes about “the poetic of nothingness”
A lot of hit and misses but even so Bronk produces banger lines.
Poems I liked most in this collections are the following:
The Outer Becoming Inner
Certain Beasts, Like Cats
The Tell
The World
Forget It
A lot of hit and misses but even so Bronk produces banger lines.
Poems I liked most in this collections are the following:
The Outer Becoming Inner
Certain Beasts, Like Cats
The Tell
The World
Forget It
Read
May 12, 2024LIVING INSTEAD
Nothing much we can do about it so we live
the way old bones and fossils lived, the way
long-buried cities lived; we live instead
—just as if and even believing that here
and finally now, ours could be the real world.
Nothing much we can do about it so we live
the way old bones and fossils lived, the way
long-buried cities lived; we live instead
—just as if and even believing that here
and finally now, ours could be the real world.
October 13, 2020
Nice collection.
November 29, 2021
Great poems. Interesting poet. Worth investigating. I had read very little of his work prior to purchasing this book.
August 13, 2025
Poems about ideas and perception, similar to Wallace Stevens, but more compact.
May 1, 2023
William Bronk has always been a favorite poet of mine, and this recently acquired Selected Poems from New Directions is a Gatling gun of his heaviest hitting pieces. Kudos to Henry Weinfield for this selection.
May 11, 2016
3.5ish
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews