Collected Poems 19531983

Lucien Stryks poetry is made of simple thingsfrost on a windowpane at morning, ducks moving across a pond, a neighbors fuss over his lawnset 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. Stryks 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 ordinaryyet as importantas breath. Stryks 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 Stryks poems, including the best of his Zen translations and a booklength 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.