Ground Work II: In the Dark

by Robert Duncan

Ground Work In the Dark  is the concluding volume of Robert Duncan’s later poems. The collection taken as a whole was proposed by the author in 1968 but withheld from publication for fifteen years in order, as he has said, for the poetry of his maturity to gestate. The first volume,  Ground Before the War , was published in 1983 to immediate it was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won for Duncan the first National Poetry Award, “for his lifetime devotion to the art of poetry and his grand achievement..” Like  Before the War , this second volume is built upon thematic groups of “An Alternate Life,” “To Master Baudelaire,” “Veil, Turbine, Cord, & Bird,” “Regulators,” and “The Five Songs”––the latter two further “Passages” and “Structures of Rime,” sequences that resonate throughout Duncan’s work of the last thirty years.  In the Dark , however, echoes a special note of intimacy, rung by the self against eternity, as the poet contemplates “this state/that knows nor sleep nor waking, nor dream…”

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Robert Edward Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams and Lawrence. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nostalgia is a very tricky subject, I think. Or maybe it's not so tricky as it is typical for a poet to rely on for its darker tones, and exceptional for a poet to form a tension from the darker tones running up against that feeling of novelty that also accompanies this perspective. And maybe, for Duncan, nothing could be solely dark. He is the dear, ecstatic poet of making. In this book, the poems are about growing old, a sentimental subject. And because it also involves living, Duncan makes it a wonder.