Book Description
Poetry. A COMMONPLACE BOOK OF PENTASTICHS is a compilation of 249 poems composed in a fine-line stanza form first introduced in THE SECRET ROOM (1997). It is the last book of his own that Laughlin helped to prepare. Musing on the full collection, Hayden Carruth writes in his introduction: "For the reader it is a survey of literature that will never be found in the classroom ... but indubitably will be found in loving longlasting proximity on many a bedside table." James Laughlin founded New Directions in 1936. His own first book, NATURAL THINGS, appeared nine years later. POEMS NEW AND SELECTED, was completed shortly before his death in 1997.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

James Laughlin (1914-97) was a poet of distinction as well as the founding publisher of New Directions. A Commonplace Book of Pentastichs, the last book of his own that he helped to prepare, is a compilation of 249 poems composed in a five-line stanza form first introduced in The Secret Room (1997). A note to "Thirty-nine Pentastichs" in that earlier volume explains: "A 'pentastich' refers simply to a poem of five lines, without regard to metrics. The present selection is of recent short-line compositions in natural voice cadence, many of them marginal jottings and paraphrases of commonplace book notations." Here, then, are armchair marginalia and apercus to be savored at random.

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