Collected Poems, 1953-1983

by Lucien Stryk

Lucien Stryk’s poetry is made of simple things — frost on a windowpane at morning, ducks moving across a pond, a neighbor’s fuss over his lawn — set into language that is at once direct and powerful.

Years of translating Zen poems and religious texts have helped give Stryk a special sense of the particular, a feel for those details which, because they are so much a part of our lives, seem to define us. Stryk’s poetry is neither an attempt to surpass these details nor an attempt to give them significance. It is an activity that exists among them, as ordinary — yet as important — as breath. Stryk’s poetic power rests in the sureness of plain speech and his insistence on a direct, sympathetic attention to the world we actually inhabit.

Collected Poems , a gathering of three decades of work, contains nearly all Stryk’s poems, including the best of his Zen translations and a book–length section of new poetry. This book is a revelation of the wonderful amid the familiar by a poet whose language and vision have found their maturity.

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Lucien Stryk was born in Poland in 1924, and moved to the United States in 1927.
He was a student of the Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Maryland, the Sorbonne, the University of London, and the University of Iowa.