SHIPWRECK IN HAVEN: TRANSCENDENTAL STUDIES, by Keith Waldrop

AWEDE, 1991, First edition of 1000 copies, 64 pp., 6 1/4" X 9 1/4", Softcover Fine Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful abstract poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium. "A fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language’s capacity to go to extremes—and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital.”