What about this Collected poems of Frank Stanford

In this comprehensive and essential retrospective, the body of work left behind by Stanford-who took his own life in 1978, at age 29-more than makes good on his insistence that "poetry busts guts." The volume presents a vital and distinctly American surrealist impulse, as Stanford, whose legacy is somewhat obscured by his extensive self-mythologizing, fearlessly explored the terror and wonder of the mind and the physical world. Published and unpublished poems coexist alongside excerpts from his 15,000-line epic, "Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You," as well as selected bits of energetic prose and other ephemera. In the course of reading, one witnesses the prismatic and visionary effects of his imagination on a richly figured world of Southern objects-knives, rivers, boats, cypress trees-where the moon can be everything from "a dead man floating down the river" to "dead fish" to the "blind eye of a fish/ in the back of a cave." What he sings here is a "song that comes apart/ Like a rosary/ In the back of a church"-an unlikely triumph of imagination over pain and death. Stanford demanded of poetry that it "mean and sing," and this is the definitive document of his uncanny ability to do just that. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Starred Review. Stanford was a legend even before his tragic suicide at nearly 30 in 1978, a charismatic author of vivid, rushing verse that's grounded in his Mississippi childhood ("I am a son of the river") and Arkansas adulthood. At his death, he left behind ten volumes of poetry and so many loose pages of poems they could have filled another ten volumes; his magnum opus, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, explores the South's racial divide in 15,000-plus fantastical lines. Michael Wiegers, executive editor of Copper Canyon, began thinking about Stanford's work in 1997 and has spent the last five years creating this masterly anthology, which can't begin to collect all that Stanford wrote but offers sumptuous servings of both his published and archival work, with Battlefield excerpted throughout. Often working through simile ("The moon wanders through my barn/ Like a widow heading for the country seat") and crescendoing lists ("I know the girl feeling the kiss of the mirror// I know the bracelet on the wrist in the tomb"), Stanford's poems capture delta life but aren't countrified, instead using distilled language to tell stories at a distinct slant. VERDICT Highly recommended work from an American original; for any serious poetry collection. [See Editors' Spring Picks, LJ 2/15/15, p. 34.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.