White Spaces: Selected Poems and Early Prose

by Paul Auster

Overview

“Magnificent poetry; dark, severe, even harsh—yet pulsating with life.” —John Ashbery

White Spaces gathers the poetry and prose of Paul Auster from various small-press books issued throughout the seventies. These early poetic works are crucial for understanding the evolution of Auster’s writing. Taut, lyrical, and always informed by a powerful and subtle music, his poems begin with basics—a swallow’s egg, stones, roots, thistle, “the glacial rose”—and push language to the breaking point. As Robert Creeley wrote, “The enduring power of these early poems is their moving address to a world all too elusive, too fragmented, and too bitterly transient.” Auster’s poems are grounded in a physical utterance that is at once an exploration of the mind and of the world. This collection begins with compact verse fragments from Spokes (originally published in Poetry, 1971) and goes through Auster’s marvelous later collections including Wall Writing (The Figures, 1976), Facing the Music (Parenthèse, 1979), and White Spaces (Station Hill, 1980).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229432
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/28/2020
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

A critically acclaimed novelist, essayist, and translator, Paul Auster lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of many novels, including 4321, The New York Trilogy, and City of Glass. New Directions publishes his Red Notebook as well as his translations of Stephane Mallarmé’s A Tomb for Anatole and Philippe Petit’s On the High Wire.

Hometown:

Brooklyn, New York

Date of Birth:

February 3, 1947

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A., M.A., Columbia University, 1970

Table of Contents

Spokes (1970) 3

Unearth (1970-72) 11

Wall Writing (1971-75)

White Nights 35

Matrix and Dream 37

Interior 38

Pulse 40

Scribe 41

Choral 42

Meridian 43

Lackawanna 44

Lies. Decrees 45

Ecliptic. Les Halles 46

Dictum: After Great Distances (California) 47

Fore-Shadows 48

Ireland 49

Prism 50

Wall Writing 51

Description of October (Mas Martin) 52

Covenant 53

Hieroglyph 55

White 56

Horizon: Moissac-Bellevue 57

Pastoral 58

Incendiary 59

Song of Degrees 60

Fire Speech 62

Lapsarian 63

Late Summer 65

Heraclitian 66

Braille 67

Salvage 68

Autobiography of the Eye 69

All Souls 70

Men Without Names (1974/75)

Pages for Kafka 73

The Death of Sir Walter Raleigh 77

Fragments from Cold (1976-77)

Northern Lights 85

Reminiscence of Home 86

Effigies 87

Gnomon 89

Fragment from Cold 91

Aubade 92

Transfusion 94

Testimony 95

Visible 96

Siberian 97

Clandestine 98

Looking Glass 99

Quarry 100

White Spaces (1978-79) 103

Facing the Music (1978-79)

Credo 115

Obituary in the Present Tense 116

Narrative 118

S. A. 1912-1979 119

Search for a Definition 120

Between the Lines 123

In Memory of Myself 124

Bedrock 125

Facing the Music 126

First Words (1969) 131

Editorial Reviews

"From the spook of ‘Spokes’ and the parabolic philosophical chiaroscuro of ‘White Spaces’ to the gnomic sighs of what’s in between, Paul Auster’s poems shimmer at the edges with audacious grace and uncanny soulfulness."

Charles Bernstein

"Anyone interested in the origins of Paul Auster’s art, its ground, will find these intense early sequences, these liminal austerities, of great interest. Auster’s is a poetry of extreme lyric condensation."

Michael Palmer