Robert Creeley’s Yesterdays is, in fact, a slim volume, printed with just six sheets of paper, plus cover stock, just 22 chapbook-sized pages of text. Yet the book shows greater range than have a number of Creeley’s larger New Directions collections. Creeley may be very focused, as the title suggests, on topics of age, but age has hardly slowed his own inventiveness. There are poems here that very much recall, say, the shorter works of Louis Zukofsky, always a touchstone for Creeley:

 

Wet

          water

warm

          fire.

 

Rough

          wood

cold

          stone.

 

Hot

          coals

shining

          star.

 

Physical hill still my will.

Mind’s ambience alters all.

 

Another poem, the title piece in fact, so closely approximates prose that Creeley does something quite rare for him – he capitalizes the first letter at the left margin to emphasize the line & enjambments: “We were waiting to get our / Hands stamped and to be given a 12 pack / Of Molson’s.” The next to last work, “Memory,” imagines Allen Ginsberg (located as “Somewhere”) “recalling his mother’s dream / about God.” The content of the dream itself is roughly identical to the old Joan Osborne song, What if God Was One of Us, beyond which the poem moves literally into a consideration of the poet’s prostate. I wonder, reading it – it’s one of my favorites in this little volume so full of gems – how a reader/poet in their 20s might respond to such a work. On the subject of age, Creeley is as unblinking in his depictions as any war journalist. My own sense is that one’s conception of time becomes much more cyclical & far less linear at a certain point – the rhythm of the seasons, for example, become more palpable as the years accelerate, which they invariably do, if only because the percentage of your life that is contained in one such cycle becomes less with each reiteration. Creeley is as articulate a commentator on this transition as we have had, precisely because he shows us both the moments of closure & its lesions.

 

The final work is particularly spooky, entitled “Remember” & dedicated to Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop, asking them to “Remember when / we all were ten . . . .” Yet Rosmarie, eleven years Creeley’s junior, hardly was in an Eden-like setting at that point in her life, the moment when the Allies were bombing her native land back in the general direction of the stone age & rounding up those leaders who didn’t commit suicide or flee to Argentina for war crimes trials. Like the poem I quoted yesterday, which reveals a fissure through the sound of the final line, one needs to hear both sides of the allusion in this final work. It both is, & isn’t, what it claims.

 

At one level, this is a volume with just six poems, although two are sequences of the sort that Creeley has explored since the publication of Words. That’s part of the marvel here, watching a master do so very much in such a compact space. Although the volume has a 2002 copyright date on it, it’s so new that it’s not yet listed on the Chax Press web site. I got my copy through Rod Smith’s most recent email mini-catalog to the Poetics List. Sent out periodically from the bookstore in D.C. where Rod works, these emails are the very best way to buy poetry in the U.S. if you don’t live within a short drive to SPD, Woodland Pattern or Grolier. If you’re not on the Poetics List  – I’ll concede that I could understand why you might not be – you can find the most recent of these catalogs here.