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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.52
EAN num: 9780811214889
ISBN number: 0811214885
Label: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: 2002-02
Publishing house: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Sale Popularity Level: 621033
Studio: New Directions Publishing Corporation
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George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost modernists. A member of the Objectivist group that flourished in the 1930s (which also included William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky), he was hailed by Ezra Pound as 'a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's book.' Oppen's New Collected Poems (which replaces New Direction's earlier, smaller Collected Poems of 1975) is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction to the poet's life and work and supplies generous notes that will give interested readers an understanding of the background of the individual books as well as references in the poems.
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Rated by buyers 
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George Oppen's New Collected Poems is an updated version of Oppens' 1979 Collected Poems. The Pulitzer Prize poet takes the reader through a journey of his life. The poems have a distinct trait, which are based on Oppen's treaded and somewhat nomadic life that he lived along with his wife, Mary. The Introduction of the book offers tidbits of an adventurous and well-travelled man as well as his controversial political leanings with communism and anti-fascism. Despite that fact, Oppen wrote each poem with a sense of time and place, and one may easily identify where he was geographically, New York, Mexico, or California and what he was writing about. In essence, he writes with the world in mind and its many intricacies.
The most distinctive aspect of his poems is his reference to the war experience. As a veteran of World War II, Oppen reflects on the lasting affect the theatre of war had on him as well as the fury of the Cold War during the 1950s. He displays this in poems that are included in The Materials collection. In addition, Oppen offers a storm of socially political poems which may be the capstone of New Collected Poems. Oppen's 40 section, 1969 prize winning book, Of Being Numerous, provides his voice of opposition to the war in Vietnam; the illustrious distinction for his work allowed wider audience to become exposed it. This collection also includes Oppen's last published book, Primitive and unpublished poems. The last portion of the book provides a run down and analysis of each collection.
New Collected Poems offers much to be discussed. However, for every reader that obtains a copy, there will always be a different perspectives to Oppen's work even if you aren't a poetic theorist. Michael Davidson states: "They are often abstract, as mysterious as koans, a sea-surge of contradictory forces: assertions and their negations, declarations couched in double negatives, questions without answers, straightforward observations placed subsequent to gnomic statements whose beauty lingers forever because they are never fully understood" (preface, x). If that may be a handful, this collection of poems may nurture your mind toward other poems and poets.
Nevertheless, Oppen does a find job of meshing together history and literature in his poems, which was an added plus for this reader.
Rated by buyers 
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This volume constitutes the most complete collection of Oppen's work to date-- many poems of which have not been anthologized until now. The centerpiece of the collection is Oppen's wonderful book-length poem-- Of Being Numerous. This Pulitzer-prize-winning poem is concerned with the dilemma of seeing the world through the eyes of solitude versus seeing the world through the eyes of what it is to be of the numerous. Throughout the poem's forty sections the reader is introduced to the meaning of what it is to be "of being numerous," warned about the shipwreck of isolation, thrust into the madness of war with all of its atrocities, reminded of the limits of language, introduced to clarity, and finally called upon to realize the necessity for compassion. A heartily recommended read!
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