A - 9780811218719

"`A"s place is in the great line of American personal epic begun in Song of Myself and stretching through The Cantos, Paterson, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, and The Dream Songs. It should be read."---Joseph Cary, The Nation

"Zukofsky's art, in this work, is without equal. No poet of our time can sound the resources of language, so actuate words to become all that they might be thought otherwise to engender."---Robert Creeley, The New York Times

"Magnificent...a great poem really rolling in all its power and splendor of language."---James Laughlin

"The long poem that comes closest to `A' as a revelatory document is The Prelude. Yet even Wordsworth leaves out much that Zukofsky includes. We sit at the poet's elbow as he writes, walk with him through the streets of Brooklyn, read his correspondence, and listen to the talk of his father, wife, and son."---Barry Ahearn, From The Introduction, "About `A'"

River that must turn full after I stop dying Song, my song, raise grief to music Light as my loves' thought, the few sick So sick of wrangling: thus weeping, Sounds of light, stay in her keeping And my son's face - this much for honor.

Long out of print, "A" is the monumental life-poem by one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978). The noted Zukofsky scholar Barry Ahearn has written a new, celebratory introduction for this authoritative edition of Zukofsky's epic masterpiece. No other poem in the English language is filled with as much daily love, light, intellect, and music. As William Carlos Williams once wrote of Zukofsky's poetry, "I hear a new music of verse stretching out into the future."