New Collected Poems

George Oppen's New Collected Poems brings together all of the great Objectivist poet's published work, together with a selection of his previously unpublished poems. George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost modernists. A member of the Objectivist group that flourished in the 1930s (which also included William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky), he was hailed by Ezra Pound as "a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's book." Oppen's New Collected Poems (which replaces New Direction's earlier, smaller Collected Poems of 1975) is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction to the poet's life and work and supplies generous notes that will give interested readers an understanding of the background of the individual books as well as references in the poems.

Author Biography: George Oppen was born in Rochester, New York. His first book of poems, Discrete Series, was published in 1934 by The Objectivist Press, after which he stopped writing poetry for nearly twenty-five years in favor of political activism, even living as an exile in Mexico in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era. New Directions subsequently published The Materials (1962), This in Which (1965), Of Being Numerous (1968), and Collected Poems (1975), which also included Seascape: Needle's Eye (1972) and Myth of the Blaze (1975). His last book, Primitive, was brought out by Black Sparrow Press in 1978. All are included here.