Ace

by Tom Raworth

Poetry. ACE, complete! This reprint of

one of Raworth's most well-received

works includes " Another End of

Ace," as well as drawings by Barry Hall

only seen in the very limited British

edition. In the early 1970s Ted Berrigan

wrote of "When I read the best of

Tom Raworth's poems, I feel proud. They

are a human accomplishment, a poet's."

Raworth is the author of over 40 books

including MEADOW, CLEAN & WELL

SELECTED POEMS 1987-1995, Eternal

Sections , and The Relation

Ship . Of his selected early poems,

TOTTERING STATE, Lyn Hejinian has

written "These are among the greatest

writings of our times."

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Early poetry showed the influences of the Black Mountain and New York School poets, particularly Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with strands from European poetry (Apollinaire), Dada, and Surrealism. His 1974 book Ace saw Raworth move to a more disjunctive style, built from short, unpunctuated lines that entice the reader into following multiple syntactic possibilities, as they knit together everything from observations of the everyday to self-reflexive commentary on the acts of thinking and writing, to affectionate lifts from pulp fiction and film noir, to political satire. A series of long poems in this mode followed--after Ace came Writing (composed 1975-77; published 1982), Catacoustics (composed 1978-81; published 1991) and West Wind (composed 1982-83; published 1984). Subsequent projects have extended this mode into a kaleidoscopic sequence of 14-line poems (not exactly "sonnets") that extended through "Sentenced to Death" (in Visible Shivers, 1987), Eternal Sections (1993) and Survival (1994). Later collections include Clean & Well Lit (1996), Meadow (1999), Caller and Other Pieces (2007) and Let Baby Fall (2008). Raworth's 650-page Collected Poems was published in 2003, though a number of major works remain uncollected, including his uncategorizable prose-work A Serial Biography (1969), a uniquely vertiginous patchwork of autobiography and fiction.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Raworth)