Tottering State: Selected Early Poems, 1963-1983

by Tom Raworth

Poetry. This new edition of TOTTERING STATE contains additional early poems by one of Britian's finest poets. Tom Raworth's lines are passing near the black hole/in ordinary flat space radically estranging the visual field by jumping time. Also included in this edition is the complete text of WRITING, long out of print. Robert Creeley has said about [He] is the one who's truly most interesting to me in England at the moment. I'm fascinated by what he's doing. He's an extraordinary poet.

Genres: Poetry

233 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

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)

Reviews

[Goodreeds User · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read an anthology of Raworth poems last year and loved it - eye-opening, inventive, playful and rewarding stuff! So why wasn't I so enamoured with this one? It's even got a fair few of the same poems but like... I just wasn't feeling it? The bits that were cheeky and anarchic before this time felt elusive and sometimes frustrating... maybe it's the selection, maybe it's the frame of mind I was in, maybe it's the font... but I just found these less entertaining and more intellectually showy than some of his other work

[Angus · Rating 5 out of 5]

hell yeah