Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems

McClure has not departed from his center-justified, breath-based lines in a career that has spanned more than half a century. One of the readers at Allan Ginsberg's famed 1955 reading of "Howl" at San Francisco's Six Gallery, McClure, unlike Ginsberg, remains closely associated with that city, and with the varieties of 20th-century Zen and other Eastern religious practice that have emerged from it. Like Philip Whalen, Charles Bukowski, and Jim Morrison (to whom one section is dedicated), McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness: "The pain is/ CHILD'S MAGIC/ drunk on/ the vistas/ of weathered/ skin." But as with the world, one has to take the good with the bad: that is the only way in which poems like McClure's Ghost Tantra make any sense: "PLEASURE FEARS ME, FOOT ROSE, FOOT BREATH,/ BY BLAHHR MAKGROOOOOOO TARRR/ nowp tytath brooooooooooooooooooo." It's that deep-end quality that keeps generations of fans of Bukowski and Morrison from discovering McClure's work, but it's also what makes him a greater poet than either of them, as this summative volume, given a little indulgence, shows. (Jan.)