Collected Poems

Dorn Edward

For the first time the vast, experimental totality of "Gunslinger" poet Edward Dorn's work is collected in a single volume. After studying with Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, Dorn took on the American West, developing an unmistakeable voice, "as evocative as a lonesome train whistle in the night". Olson praised his "Shakespearean ear for syllables". Taking his bearings from Pound and Williams, he found his own way, a pioneer in the old American way. "From near the beginning I have known my work to be theoretical in nature and poetic by virtue of its inherent tone". Peter Ackroyd considers him "the only plausible, political poet in America [...] one of the masters of our contemporary language". If "Gunslinger" is his major poem, the work that anticipates and surrounds it, wonderfully resourceful in tone and idiom, puts him on an equal footing with his masters.

About the Author

Edward Dorn was born in Eastern Illinois in 1929 and grew up in rural poverty during the Great Depression. After two years at the University of Illinois, "a set of circumstances and warps of destiny" took him to Black Mountain College, where he studied with Charles Olson. For several years he travelled through the far West of America, following the winds of writing and employment. In 1961 he became a teacher at the University of Idaho and saw the publication of his first book of poetry. Invited by Donald Davie in 1965 to join the faculty at the new University of Essex, he spent most of the next five years in England, where he wrote the first book of his epic "Gunslinger". In the 1970s he taught at universities from Chicago to California, and again at Essex, before accepting a professorship in 1978 at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he directed the creative writing program, and continued teaching until his death in December 1999. He is the author of over forty books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and translation.

Reviews

"This monumental and superbly produced 'Collected Poems' from Manchester's Carcanet Press should go some way to rectifying things, for it reveals the body of Dorn's lifelong work in poetry as an achievement of tremendous intelligence, scope and energy" – Matthew Sperling, The London Magazine

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