Collected Works

"Lorine Niedecker proves a major poet of the 20th century, just as Emily Dickinson was for the 19th. Bleak indeed that both should have been so curiously overwritten and ignored, when their work defined the time in which they lived with such genius. Jenny Penberthy has provided an excellent text and a comprehensive, detailing introduction. Finally, we have the collected poems of that poet whom her peers thought the very best of their company. Now one can know why."--Robert Creeley, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975

"Lorine Niedecker was neither a Sappho nor an Emily Dickinson. She was a mid-western-born, self-created modernist who worked as a librarian, a floor-scrubber, a WPA writer, a housewife; and whose acrid, vitally alive poems earned her the admiration and friendship of her poetic peers."-- Adrienne Rich, author of Diving into the Wreck

"Like the other poets associated with the Objectivist movement, Lorine Niedecker's work is quiet, original, and exact. She's as much of her place, that watery world of the Wisconsin lake country, as any American writer and as quirky as the best of them."-- Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States

"If she lacks the epigrammatist's cutting assurance, Niedecker's semblance of unpreparedness may make for a greater precision of statement: Kenneth Cox says it all when he describes her setting one thing alongside another with 'the tremulous certainty of a compass needle.'"-- Thom Gunn, author of Boss Cupid

Lorine Niedecker was born in 1903 and died in 1970. Among her published work is New Goose (1946), My Friend Tree (1961), North Central (1968), T&G: Collected Poems, 1936-1966 (1969), My Life by Water: Collected Poems, 1936-1968 (1970), Blue Chicory (1976), From This Condensery (1985), and The Granite Pail (1985). Jenny Penberthy is Professor of English at Capilano College, Vancouver. She is editor of Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet (1996) and of Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931-1970 (1993).