Ring of Bone Collected Poems 1950-1971

Rating:
Summary: Gary¿s Choice
Review: Buy and enjoy the whole thing (Ring of Bone) instead. Lew Welch may have been less certain about this and that, most of his life, than this selection or refinement suggests. When a writer disappears suddenly, the entire remaining mess is often interesting. Selections reveal much about their editors, of course.

Rating:
Summary: Half of the Best
Review: I'm not sure how reviews about Lew Welch got attached to this record, but this is Ed Dorn's Selected Poems. I am very sorry to see that it's out of print because this excellent selection and Etruscan Book's High West Rendezvous together make up the best sampling of Dorn's work I've read outside of Gunslinger. (Read Gunslinger too.) I dream of the day a complete Poems appears, but until then the best of the best can be rounded up in this Selected and High West Rendezvous (for his later work). Both are recommended without reservation.

Rating:
Summary: Half of the Best
Review: I'm not sure how reviews about Lew Welch got attached to this record, but this is Ed Dorn's Selected Poems. I am very sorry to see that it's out of print because this excellent selection and Etruscan Book's High West Rendezvous together make up the best sampling of Dorn's work I've read outside of Gunslinger. (Read Gunslinger too.) I dream of the day a complete Poems appears, but until then the best of the best can be rounded up in this Selected and High West Rendezvous (for his later work). Both are recommended without reservation.

Rating:
Summary: The Whole Thing Instead
Review: Lew Welch experimented with Life in These United States before choosing the Life of Poetry. Ring of Bone, collected and lightly/deftly edited and introduced by Donald Allen shortly after Lew's disappearance, reveals a man with more open eyes/ears and wider empathy than fellow (and dearly beloved) sons-of-witches who never wavered. Or never obviously wavered. Or never wavered all the way out of this world without a trace. The difference in tone and impact between this book and a later selection edited by Gary Snyder is profound. Amazon treats both as same for review purposes, but this is not so. Currently on back order, which is a bit frightening, since much of the less elegantly crafted or only semi-finalized writing included in this collection but absent from Selected Poems feels essential to me. Not just what Lew himself may have imagined, in the end, he should have written and released, but a wide smattering of what he did write, the bulk of the whole thing. In a clamshell.