Penguin Poets presents “Dolphin Skull,” Michael McClure’s newest long poem of the imagination, published here for the first time with two of McClure’s earlier works. Spontaneously written with long gazes into the unconscious, it is also an exploration of the fullness of memory in the present moment.
In “Rare Angel,” MClure uses his totem animals of sea and land to write a vivid environmental poem, a work of the present that stretches back in time as well as vividly out into the Milky Way.
When Jack Kerouac first heard “Dark Brown,” he called it “the most fantastic poem in America.” Written shortly after the legendary Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, it is an energetic and intensely erotic poem about the struggle for liberation and our nature as human mammals.
“This poetry is soulful freedom at play in the Desire-realm—echoing ballad, blues, old lyrics, as it turns and displays. Celebratory, elusive, freshly deliberative rituals—amazing.” —Gary Snyder
“The key is this: McClure does not make things up. He reports with exactness. Fastidious exactness…His objects are clear and present, things in themselves…. The work is endowed with emotion and morality…but these features are largely exterior to a more specific aim—a purely poetic gesture. —from the Introduction by Robert Hunter
Publisher: Penguin Poets
Year: 1995
ISBN: 978-0140587098
with an introduction by Robert Hunter