At some point, I bought a copy of The Palm at the End of the Mind, a collection of Wallace Stevens’ poems. Although it is said to be “selected poems”, it seems to be fairly complete. My paperback copy is 404 pages.

The editor is Holly Stevens, his daughter. She wrote in the Preface, “The poems included in this selection have been chosen to represent my father not only at his best but also in the full range of his imagination. They have been arranged in chronological order, determined from manuscript evidence, correspondence, or date of publication.” Although these are selected, it seems like a complete collection to me.

I’ve known about Wallace Stevens for some time but had read little of his poetry. He has some poems in anthologies that I have leafed through, but if I read any of his, they didn’t make much of an impression on me. Until this collection, that is. I bought this, I suppose, to try to have a more “rounded out” collection of poets’ works. Stevens lived from 1879 to 1955, so was a poet of the 21st Century. I assumed that would make him essentially a free verse poet, that assumption being informed by snippets about him that I had read in magazines or short bios.

Sure enough, that’s what I discovered as I read in this volume.  Almost everything in it is free verse. I’ve made no bones about it that I don’t understand free verse and can’t appreciate it. Thus, it’s no surprise that I didn’t like what I was reading in this book. The first poem seemed pretty good, however, and I read on. Alas, for me it was all downhill from there. I had great difficulty finding enjoyment in most of the other poems.

Heck, I didn’t understand most of them. They seemed to be a series of unrelated and disconnected images. I just skimmed through the book to find an example of this. Virtually every poem has those types of images and language, but I think I won’t quote them here.

So, I gave up with Mr. Stevens’ book. I hate to do that with any book. Before I did I got to page 100, 1/4th of the way through the book, so that I could say I gave it an honest trial.

And, as you can suspect, the book is not a keeper. I hate to break up my poetry collection, but with this one I start the process.