Description
“Magnificent poetry; dark, severe, even harsh—yet pulsating with life.” —John Ashbery
White Spaces gathers the poetry and prose of Paul Auster from various small-press books issued throughout the seventies. These early poetic works are crucial for understanding the evolution of Auster’s writing. Taut, lyrical, and always informed by a powerful and subtle music, his poems begin with basics—a swallow’s egg, stones, roots, thistle, “the glacial rose”—and push language to the breaking point. As Robert Creeley wrote, “The enduring power of these early poems is their moving address to a world all too elusive, too fragmented, and too bitterly transient.” Auster’s poems are grounded in a physical utterance that is at once an exploration of the mind and of the world. This collection begins with compact verse fragments from Spokes (originally published in Poetry, 1971) and goes through Auster’s marvelous later collections including Wall Writing (The Figures, 1976), Facing the Music (Parenthese, 1979), and White Spaces (Station Hill, 1980).
Reviews
"From the spook of ‘Spokes’ and the parabolic philosophical chiaroscuro of ‘White Spaces’ to the gnomic sighs of what’s in between, Paul Auster’s poems shimmer at the edges with audacious grace and uncanny soulfulness." — Charles Bernstein
"Anyone interested in the origins of Paul Auster’s art, its ground, will find these intense early sequences, these liminal austerities, of great interest. Auster’s is a poetry of extreme lyric condensation." — Michael Palmer
Also By: Paul Auster 
On the High Wire
E Book, 2019
“On the High Wire is fascinating to read. You will learn about the man, his work, his passion, his tenacity and lucidity” (Marcel Marceau)
On the High Wire
Paperback, 2019
“On the High Wire is fascinating to read. You will learn about the man, his work, his passion, his tenacity and lucidity” (Marcel Marceau)
The Red Notebook: True Stories
E Book, 2012
The Red Notebook brings together in one volume all of Paul Auster's short, true-life stories—a remarkable collection of tales that documents the curious, miraculous, and sometimes catastrophic...
A Tomb for Anatole: Poetry
Paperback, 2005
An immensely moving poetic work addressing inconsolable sorrow: a father's pain over the death of his child. Bilingual.
