The Pisan Cantos

This is a handsome, convenient edition of some of the best poetry of Pound's career. That means it's a handsome, convenient edition of some of the best poetry in English, complete with very useful glosses and an elegant introduction. New to Pound? Dive in, but perhaps consider taking with you this superb guide The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Bison Book) . Later, if you're still intrigued and can find it, grab Pound's Cantos as well. Here's hoping that Mr, Sieburth find his way to similarly annotating the equally fine "Rock Drill" sequence.

I read this out loud last summer during a cross country road trip. It's an incredible work and reading it with someone else provided lots of material for discussion as we whiled the miles away.

This magnum opus of one of the most celebrated and controversial figures in literature was written while he was being held in detention for treason. He was a fascist, and anti-Semite, but how the chicks, and Allen Ginsberg, dug him. And you should, too--politics aside. Pound's writings on poetry were monumental in the formation of greats like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and the aforementioned Ginsberg. The Cantos are gorgeously wrought, and range from exquisitely beautiful to fantastically erudite and opaque. And it's fun to watch him make up arbitrary meanings for Chinese ideograms because some posthumously debunked scholar misled him.

This superbly edited volume makes Pound's "Pisans" readily available in an attractive and affordable paperback edition. This is some of the most important American poetry of the post-War period, with intelligent and helpful annotations to make the work fully accessible even to those not versed in Poundian arcana. Indispensable!

First the poetry is beautiful beyond belief but very difficult to read if the book did not have the excellent reference notes.

Glad to get this book, but unhappy to find it marked up in pen with stupid comments.

The Pantos Cantos takes us back to the days of Modernism when artists had heart and desired to experiment. These days, writers have to pander to illiterate readers, ambitious editors and know-nothing marketing departments. This is in-your-face art for art's sake, gloriously elitist, ugly, difficult, sprawling, all that good and high art should be. Who needs readers? Who needs post-modernist defence of the popular and accessible?