Robert Kelly

Softcover, 224 pages ISBN 1-57423-186-3 2005, $18.95     Lapis new poems by Robert Kelly Click here for an online preview of Lapis “Lapis offers dream narratives, elegies, prayers, anecdotes, parables, dialogues, and folktales from a land that may not exist. . . . Kelly has done something remarkable. He has given magic back its dignity, finding it in human warmth.” ––Joseph Donahue, Bookforum Lapis, the philosopher’s stone, is the legendary substance that alchemists use to turn base metals into gold. Robert Kelly’s fifty-year pursuit of its poetic equivalent––the words that transform the common things of life into art––yields the 127 new texts collected here. In these richly varied poems and prose poems––some occasioned by reading Dickinson and Yeats, visiting churches and art museums, traveling through Austria, France, Italy, and Ireland, and reliving the wounds the wounds of childhood and adolescence––Kelly describes personal experience and, by touching it with memory and imagination, makes it stranger than life itself. He is the diarist as dreamer, and the dreamer as alchemist. “Poem after poem builds on razor-sharp textures that draw the eye to the obvious and to the hidden world behind it,” said The Bloomsbury Review of Kelly’s previous collection, The Time of Voice. The same can be said of Lapis, for here again is poetry that gleams in the light of the numinous.   Softcover, 192 pages ISBN 1-57423-079-4 1998, $16.95   The Time of Voice: Poems 1994-1996 by Robert Kelly “Kelly remains a true and original voice in American poetry. He is one of the few prolific writers whose every book is a welcome revelation." ––Bloomsbury Review The Time of Voice collects ninety poems by Robert Kelly written between 1992 and 1994. Of his methods, the poet writes: “Writing is the generosity of writing down whatever comes into your mind, in sequence, as true as you can, The diligence of working with that, in all the ways you can, to make it speak, to make it say more than you know. . . . The patience to know that what the writing is saying is more important, always, than what you want to say. . . . The moral discipline not to use the words to sell yourself or your ideas. The concentration to stay with the work under hand, stay inside it, thinking only with it and not beside it, letting all thinking and feeling come to focus in it, as it. The wisdom to know when you’re done. When it’s done.” “Robert Kelly's long project in verse, now filling nearly forty collections, has shown him to be a master of intellectual energy, kinetic power, and primal apprehension, with a range of interest and symbolic resonance as extensive and diverse as any contemporary poet's. The poems in The Time of Voice are perhaps his most accessible to date, underscoring the familiar brilliance of mind and movement with a new depth of emotional understanding. This is writing that jumpstarts not only the cerebrum, nerves, and senses, but also the feeling heart: a poetry of key moments, necessary rituals, inevitable passages, recurrent beginnings and ends.” ––Tom Clark “Robert Kelly knows that poetry is a struggle of the language to be more than itself, to mean more than language can normally say. Prose is logic; poetry is, at least partly, a shamanism. Kelly gets at the sense that there is something larger behind the everyday.” ––New York Press   Softcover, 400 pages ISBN 0-87685-977-5 1995, $18.95   Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 by Robert Kelly Softcover, 220 pages ISBN 0-87685-875-2 1992, $12.95   A Strange Market poems by Robert Kelly   Softcover, 188 pages ISBN 0-87685-692-X 1992, $12.95   Not This Island Music poems by Robert Kelly   Softcover, 162 pages ISBN 0-87685-594-X 1983, $12.95   Under Words poems by Robert Kelly Softcover, 248 pages ISBN 0-87685-432-3 1979, $12.95   Kill The Messenger poems by Robert Kelly   Softcover, 144 pages ISBN 0-87685-312-2 1978, $12.95   The Convections poems by Robert Kelly