CCA News

Michael McClure: Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems

Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook

Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems
University of California Press, 2011
Hardcover, 344 pages, $34.95

An essential collection of poems by Michael McClure, longtime CCA faculty member and 2005 recipient of CCA's honorary doctorate of fine arts. It contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than 50 years. Ranging from "A Fist Full," published in 1957, through "Swirls in Asphalt," a new poem sequence, Of Indigo and Saffron is both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku.