From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps best known for his recitation of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Martin Scorsese's film The Last Waltz , McClure has written more than 30 books--novels, plays, poetry, essays. Many of the poems in Simple Eyes were composed for spoken performances, in which the writer collaborates with the pianist Ray Manzarek of the Doors. The poems strive for an avant-garde freshness, but are rooted in the spiritual and visionary excesses of the '60s. In his introduction, McClure explains that his poetry "is not written in free verse but in a poetics that Charles Olson called projective verse. . . . I write with a breath line and I listen to the syllable as it appears in my voice or on the tip of my pen or on my screen or on my field of energies." In practice, this means the poems--which form a sort of spiritual diary--often have lines all in capital letters and words spelled vertically down the page, making them look, though not sound, like work by e.e. cummings. McClure draws his subjects from travel, from the work of other poets (e.g. Robert Creeley), and pop art. At the center of the volume is a long sequence of poems, "Fields," a "spiritual autobiography," in which each field, or poem, presents an event of consciousness. It begins: "THESE ARE MY FINE SWEET POEMS!! Immortal as butterfly wings / and the song that the eagle sings as he screams / diving!" And ends: "Everything is there /that touched and made me." For those who prefer the aural and gestural aspects of poetry to more traditional literary strategies, this book will certainly outlast a butterfly's wing or an eagle's song. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The running theme in Michael McClure's Simple Eyes & Other Poems is: looking at the world directly. The results are often as disquieting as they are illuminating, whether he directs his unblinking gaze on the American cityscape, the landscapes of Mexico and Kenya, or the mind's own terrain. In the long title poem, "Simple Eyes (Fields)," the stanzas on the Persian Gulf War bloom out of images of all wars the poet has known - "the spiritual wars, the napalm and cordite and nuclear wars, and the war against nature" - and become a kind of spiritual autobiography. At the heart of the poetry is McClure's return to the ancient concept of agnosia, the idea of knowing through unknowing, as a way of living in desperate times, in which deep human or humane feelings have almost become outlaw. Simple Eyes is an outspoken poet's statement, unsentimental, yet with mind and eye quickened by love.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly