"The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound."--William Carlos Williams
"It is a study, how Creeley lands syntax down the alley, and his vocabulary-pure English-to hit meters and rhymes all of which are spares and strikes."--Charles Olson
"Robert Creeley has created a noble body of poetry that extends the work of his predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson, and provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness."--Allen Ginsberg
"His succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond." --John Ashbery
"Robert Creeley was one of the great giants of 20th Century American poetry. This collection is his monument." --Paul Auster
"American poetry is unimaginable and, happily, unknowable without Creeley."--Andrei Codrescu, author of "it was today: new poems"
"Creeley is a touchstone for me-a measure of what poetry is. He is a genius of the sensorium as Kerouac was and a master of the ear as is Miles Davis. He is a carver in space like Van Gogh."--Michael McClure
"There is no poetry more vivid, immediate, or telling than Robert Creeley's. His "Collected Poems" extends the achievement of Dickinson, Whitman, and Williams into postwar America. Creeley's excavation of particular words, images, and sentiments resonate beyond the pages of this book into the fabric of everyday life. This is American invention at its best, as necessary as the air we breathe and the ground we walk on."--Charles Bernstein
"'It isn't what a poet says that counts as a work of art, ' William Carlos Williams once wrote, 'it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception thatit lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.' I can't think of another contemporary poet whose acute sensitivity to the particular event of making (and in poetry "making" includes "breaking") each written line is as consummately fine-tuned as Robert Creeley's."--Susan Howe
"He was the main support in the old house of poetry--the main beam."--C.D. Wright, Brown University alumni newsletter
"There is no poet like Creeley. His multiple subjectivities and magic syllables have kept us curious and honest. Never a false step, never a less than tender heart for the sound, and the brilliant cognitive, often fierce power therein. What a glorious long life in writing. These late poems keep the brilliant tempo. We are very lucky he is still so much among us."--Anne Waldman
"Robert Creeley transformed the momentary, spontaneous music of being alive into a profoundly enduring American art: brilliant, necessary, impeccably scored. He made it new for always."--Peter Gizzi

"Here is Creeley at his skillfully selected best: full of the melodies of plain speech, concise yet resonant with emotion."--Juliana Spahr, author of "This Connection of Everyone with Lungs"
"So fantastically simple and so satisfyingly complicated, these poems band together like the days in 'One Day': 'One day after another-/ perfect./ They all fit.'"--John Ashbery
"Beautifully edited by Ben Friedlander with tenderness, intelligence, and care. A superb selection, well-introduced. "Selected Poems" provides a great sense of the range of Creeley's accomplishment--these poems among the most important of our time--a way of writing with the hesitations and grace of a new-found line, thinking informed by sources from Emily Dickinson to Charlie Parker.A "Selected Poems" is at once a tribute to Creeley, a perfect introduction for new readers, and a valuable distillation for those who have already acquired a taste for Creeley's poetry. The perfect assembly to and for one so fond of saying 'onward.' We can now go onward with these selected poems, onward with these well-chosen words, with thanks to Robert Creeley and to Ben Friedlander."--Hank Lazer, author of "The New Spirit"
"Benjamin Friedlander, himself a fine poet-critic and a great connoisseur of Creeley's poetry, has put together a superb selection."--Marjorie Perloff
"An excellent selection and introduction. It is an edition that acknowledges work that has defined the poet's career while offering a new narrative for the entire oeuvre. It will join UC Press's distinguished and definitive editionsof postwar poetry and will provide us all with a summary guide to Creeley's best work."--Michael Davidson
"In a quiet moment Ihear Bob pause where I never would have expected it. Such resolve. Such heart. And an ear to reckon with. No truly further American poem without his."--Clark Coolidge, author of "Counting on Planet Zero"

Robert Creely, Wilmington, N.C., June 29, 1981: There is a sense of increment, of accumulation, in these poems that is very dear to me. Like it or not, it outwits whatever I then thought to say and gains thereby whatever I was in saying it. Thankfully, I was never what I thought I was, certainly never enough. Otherwise, when it came time to think specifically of this collection and of what might be decorously omitted, I decided to stick with my initial judgments, book by tender book, because these were the occasions most definitive of what the poems might mean, either to me or to anyone else. To define their value in hindsight would be to miss the factual life they had either made manifest or engendered. So everything that was printed in a book between the dates of 1945 and 1975 is here included as are also those poems published in magazines or broadsides. In short, all that was in print is here. I'm delighted that they are all finally together, respected, included, each with their place - like some ultimate family reunion! I feel much relieved to see them now as a company at last. I'm tempted to invoke again those poets who served as a measure and resource for me all my life as a poet. But either they will be heard here, in the words and rhythms themselves, or one will simply know the. This time I am, in this respect, alone these are my poems. We are a singular compact. Finally, there's no end to any of it, or none we'll know that simply. But I'm very relieved that this much, like they say, is done. So be it.