Uncollected Poems (Shearsman Library)

Gustaf Sobin's Uncollected Poems brings under one set of covers some fugitive pieces that did not make it into his official posthumous Collected Poems (2010), together with some occasional works and two full-length volumes that stood outside the normal trajectory of his poetry: Articles of Light and Elation and Sicilian Miniatures, the former published in a bibliophile edition and the latter never distributed commercially. This Uncollected fills out the picture of the author's work more fully than ever before."Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious." -Charles Tomlinson Read more