Ground Work: Before the War/In the Dark (New Directions Paperbook)

Robert Duncan's Groundwork, the American poet's unparalleled final masterpiece, is now available in a single volume.I am speaking now of the Dream in which America sleeps, the New World, moaning, floundering, in three hundred years of invasions, our own history out of Europe and enslaved Africa.Robert Duncan, from GroundworkRobert Duncan has been widely venerated as one of America's most essential poets: Allen Ginsberg described his poetry as "rapturous wonderings of inspiration," Gwendolyn Brooks called it "a subtle spice," and Susan Howe pointed to Duncan as "my precursor father," Lawrence Ferlinghetti said he "had the finest ear this side of Dante," and Robert Creeley called him "the magister, the singular Master of the Dance."Now Duncan's magnum opus, Groundwork, is available in one groundbreaking edition. The first volume, Groundwork I: Before the War, was published in 1984, after a fifteen-year publishing silence, and received immediate acclaim: it was nominated for a National Bo