Spiritual Necessity

"It is a major event indeed to have this defining selection of Frank Samperi's immaculate work at last available for new readers. This consummate poet is so quiet in his authority, so singularly perceptive of the life he lived each day by given day. Whoever cared more than he did-or could find as absolute a way of saying so? If life matters, here are the poems which tell why,"-Robert Creeley"...poetry of unmitigated probity. It scales the religious, attempting to illuminate a little a spiritual world from which we are mostly outcasts. Its form is vision which cares for the word entered, lived, died, at every breath,with a gravity perhaps dismaying but no less moving for that. Its difficult is the difficult of human being in the light of divinity. Its blessing is that it opens anew for us some of the timeless possibility,"-Cid Corman"Poetry, for Samperi, was a spiritual pursuit, the embodying, in words, of his ongoing engagement with the transcendent...I hold him to be an exemplary figu

Frank Samperi Frank Samperi (1933-1991) was discovered by Louis Zukofsky and Cid Corman; he published some 20 books of poetry and appeared prominently in journals such as Origin and Caterpillar. Master of the lyric and an autodidact steeped in Dante, Aquinas, and Shankara, Samperi created a unified, highly original lifepoem of pilgrimage through the American city and world of the spirit.

John Martone