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Rating: 
Summary: Remarkable and Serious Fare for a great american poet...
Review: Any serious person would love Ed Dorn, and I've been an admirer of his through poetry readings (at UCSD, when I was a student there), into earlier years when he was at Black Mountain College (when I wasn't born), and through the great works: Slinger, the North Atlantic Turbine, the Collected Works, and all the editions in between and later. I was so saddened when I learned he'd died; I wasn't so patched in that I heard about it right away, but the passing left a void. Dorn wrote political poetry, but also great poetry; he avoided the fuzziness of the Beats while capturing their passion and engagement with life. He was a scholar -- especially of the American West -- and he made much of what he could do. This biography by Tom Clark is a completely solid one -- it catches the essentials, perhaps more strongly in the later years than in the early ones (thus the one-star deduction). Tom is an accomplished writer, essayist, biographer, and poet in his own right, and that mastery shows. But if you're interested in one of the great minds, and one suffused with a gentle (and at times not) skepticism about the West and its geography, you will find this of value. And then, please DO load up on Ed Dorn and his essays and poetry volumes. You will find that they do not pall, and that all you bring to them add to their strength, and to yours.
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