Long awaited collection of a singular American poet

Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply felt but largely invisible. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo’s aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light the highly original voice that was operating at an increasing remove from the currents of the time. From a poetics associated with Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to an ever more contemplative, deeply visionary poetics similar in sensibility to Zen and Dante, William Blake and St. John of the Cross, this collection shows how Ceravolo’s poetry takes on a direct, quiet lyricism: intensely dedicated to the natural and spiritual life of the individual. As Ron Silliman notes, Ceravolo’s later work reveals him to be “one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation.” Many new pieces, including the masterful long poem “The Hellgate,” are published here for the first time. This volume is a landmark edition for American poetry, and includes an introduction by David Lehman.

Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reviews:

“Possibly the New York School’s biggest secret—because the publicity-shy poet died young—is Joseph Ceravolo. His poetry is wonderful, it is distinctive, in some ways it seems anomalous in the New York context;”—David Lehman, Best American Poetry Blog

“Fascinating, unwieldy, and sometimes sublime, this first collected for the New Jersey–based Ceravolo (1934-88) reveals a poet wilder—and potentially far more popular—than the one all but a few strong admirers know.…This big book will spark new interest; it might even attract fans of Rumi, or of the Beats.”—Publishers Weekly

“Ceravolo transcends the canon…(his) verse is at once classical and fresh, tender and profound, succinct and expansive, tantalizingly parseable yet divinely ineffable. It would take a lifetime of expert reading to fully appreciate this lifetime of superlative writing; with the long-awaited publication of a collected Ceravolo, America’s contemporary poetry readers now have the opportunity to do their part.”—Huffington Post

Endorsements:

“Joseph Ceravolo’s poetry, like the very best poetry, is at once timeless and contemporary, magical and truthful, visionary and real. One never ceases to be moved and astonished by his highly original poetics. His work is always revelatory. Always.”—Peter Gizzi

“To read the poems of Joseph Ceravolo is to stride in radiance and through a coronal of colors, all of them tender. And yet his tenderness and the purity of his vision are not fragile, not ephemeral. Ceravolo is the strongest of American poets, the Villon of our apocalypse. His color is words, but his shape is the shape of action.”—Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems

From the Book:

Woods

The hawks float over us
two next to each other
hunting us all day
to tell us we live and breathe
the harsh woods,

and the deer scent pervades
justice, honor, freedom
in that sacred spot inside.

The hawks on the air
we on the sphagnum
of this bog in
reforming the earth.

We stop, we stalk
the ancient trail in the rain.
The flap of wings,
the song inside mixing
with our heated eyes
and insides. The hawk

like Hermes follows us.
It is everywhere, it is nowhere
follows our inside eyes
follows beyond solar winds
beyond golden shadows of death
to a common eternity.

—from Mad Angels

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts