This welcome collection of essays addressing Robert Duncan s late writings offers an informative, thought-provoking range of insight and approach. The essays are blessed with deep archival, philological, and contextualizing reach, resonantly engaging the heft and the restive harmonics of Duncan s work. - Nathaniel Mackey, Reynolds Price Professor of English, Duke University
This brilliant and much-needed collection of essays, along with three important works by Duncan himself, addresses the dynamics and materials of Duncan s making, the complex forces at work in his writing-as-reading and reading-as-writing, the range of his inclusive explorations and across-the-board readings, his investigations of other languages - and worlds besides.These essays exhilarate the connectedness of the late, great poems of Ground Work to the earlier, all the way from The Years as Catches to Bending the Bow. - Peter Quartermain, Professor of English Emeritus, University of British Columbia and author of Disjunctive Poetics from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe
Offers a definitive treatment of a poet for whom reading was a mode of being and writing an entry into cosmic orders. Far from providing a critical consensus on Duncan s notoriously eclectic work, these essays show the generative and rhizomatic trajectories his thought could pursue. Building on extensive archival research, essays in this volume trace Duncan s response to events of his own later years - Vietnam, feminism, gay liberation, as well as his own household, friendships, and mortality. With the long-awaited arrival of a multi-volume edition of Duncan s collected writings (Re:)Working the Ground re-opens the field of inquiry for this vital American poet. - Michael Davidson, Distinguished Professor of American Literature, UC San Diego