The Time of Voice: Poems 1994-1996

by Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly's long project in verse, filling nearly 40 collections, has shown him a master of intellectual energy, kinetic power and primal apprehension, with a range of interest and symbolic resonance as extensive and diverse as any contemporary poet's.

Kelly's new poems in The Time of Voice are perhaps his most accessible to date, underscoring the familiar brilliance of mind and movement with a new depth of emotional understanding. This is writing that jump-starts not only the cerebrum, nerves and senses but the feeling heart: a poetry of key moments, necessary rituals, inevitable passages, recurrent beginnings and ends.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965).Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roychoudhury,with whom he had correspondence,now archived at Kolkata.

Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time.

Reviews

[Tommy]

not only is he brilliant, he's my uncle.

[George]

The poems live up to the remarkable title of this gathering.