"A" - Tapa blanda

"I have been reading away at `A' since Doubleday brought out an edition of its first twelve sections... in l967. I have found it alternately and in no special order strange, beautiful, mad, touching, unreadable, readable, elusive, fascinating. Now I have all 800 pages in hand... I see no reason to change my mind--except to say that in sum I respect and am moved by it all... the labor of one quiet, stubborn, possessed man's lifetime. It is a big poem in all senses.... Its 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, Maximus, and The Dream Songs. It should be read." -- Joseph Cary, The Nation

"He is a master of the allusive word collage wed to the cadence of music and the rhythms of the sounds themselves." -- The Reader's Review

"The contents page of this extremely useful edition notes that the first section of the poem (there are 24 in all, which number echoes for me significantly the human measure of a day) was written in 1928, when the poet was 24 years old. The last writing is dated 1974 ('A' 23), so that one has the range of 46 years--without question a life's commitment, in all possible respects to what does come and go of a day, and what does stay put--as value, as measure, as possibility.... Zukofsky's art, in this work, is without equal. No poet of our time can so sound the resources of language, so actuate words to become all that they might be thought otherwise to engender" -- Robert Creeley, New York Times

"The most hermetic poem in English, which they will still be elucidating in the 22nd century." -- Hugh Kenner, New York Times

Louis Zukofsky's most important poetic work now returns to print in a new softcover edition.