Shearsman Library Vol. 23.
2nd Edition; 1st UK edition. PAPERBACK VERSION Published 2025. Paperback, 740pp, 9 x 6ins, £29.95 / $42.50.
ISBN 9781848619944 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Gustaf Sobin’s poems are not, in any superficial sense, ‘painterly’, but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin’s attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin’s world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid – and mysterious.”
—Charles Tomlinson
“Gustaf Sobin is sui generis,
one of the deep figures of recent times. He is one of our dark and scintillating stars, his poetry a gift to our art now when there is a dearth of beauty and of myriadness of intelligence.” —Michael McClure
Sobin “is a master of hoverings, hesitances, etched definitions of movement, soundings, fine measurings of air. He leads the mind into a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarities renewed.” —Robert Duncan
“A consummate poet.” —Robert Creeley
“Sobin is a Romantic poet of the highest order.” — Boston Review
"The expatriate American poet is a national treasure." — Rain Taxi
“Sobin’s work has an inevitability in its momentum and its music that only great poems achieve. It is not an imitation of motion, a copy of nature but true poiesis in which meaning is synonymous with its creation.” — American Book Review
“I can’t think of anyone in our time who has trod the via negativa
so determinedly and with such purpose. The texture of the ground, but also the grain of what lies beneath it. And so, the miracle, as Oppen would say, that there is a music in all this, in all this nothing, our brief glimpse.” —Michael Palmer
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