“For many younger readers, the members of the post-World War II ‘San Francisco Renaissance,’ like their cohorts among the Black Mountain poets, are little more than names. Once the poems of Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan were ‘required texts.’ Today, with luck, they might make it into ‘recommended reading.’ Posterity winnows ruthlessly, and, rightly or not, the American poets of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s who seem to be passing into the canon are largely East Coast folk—elegant Elizabeth Bishop, confessional Robert Lowell, howling Allen Ginsberg, formalist Richard Wilbur and perhaps a half-dozen others. This makes Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan all the more valuable.”
“Jarnot has done her homework, and she gives readers an exhaustive, meticulously detailed account of Duncan’s life. . . . Highly recommended.”
“In organizing a mass of previously unavailable archive material, Jarnot's study will serve as an indispensable reference text—if not the first port of call—for anyone hoping to make headway through the metaphysical tangle of Duncan's oeuvre. . . . Readers of Jarnot's biography will find Duncan's life realized, at last, in all its fictive certainty.”
"Jarnot is a sensitive reader of literary history and an admiring but not uncritical biographer. She is also not above serving up the scuttlebutt that we’ve come, as readers, to expect as our literary-biographical due."
“Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan should only stoke further interest in his work. She avoids the usual two pitfalls—worship and apostasy—by cleaving to a style so clean and free of editorializing or psychologizing that it reads like reportage. . . . To do more, she avers in her introduction, would have meant taking a turn toward criticism—something she wanted to avoid. The result is a book of just the facts: what, where, when and who. And yet Jarnot, a poet herself, is sensitive to the symbols and cycles that defined Duncan’s imaginative life.”
"This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan."
“This is a book of wonders, beautifully written and brilliantly researched. Lisa Jarnot offers a work of devotion to the truth and spirit of Robert Duncan's life and art, the result of twenty years of study and reflection. A great story as well as a rigorous exploration of the poet's art of the imagination, it will pull readers back into Duncan's poetry at the same time that it recounts his rich, adventurous, and always creative life.”—Robert Adamson, author of The Goldfinches of Baghdad.
"Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Robert Duncan represents an essential contribution to our understanding of this complex, inspirited man, his life and art, and the many circles in which he moved through the years. It is one of those rare works that melds scholarly diligence with poetic comprehension."—Michael Palmer, author of Thread.
"Robert Duncan was a poet of enormous means and complexity, one of the last to pursue a truly cosmological poetics. In that pursuit he was a poet (even a great poet), who created – like Whitman before him – his own life with all its openings & pitfalls as beyond all else a life-of-poetry. Lisa Jarnot's biography now gives us a first, richly detailed depiction of that life, a powerful and necessary complement to Duncan’s poetry itself. A product of the century behind us, it offers up a lasting legacy for the century to come."—Jerome Rothenberg, author of Technicians of the Sacred.
