The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker

By Lorine Niedecker

This edition was published in 1996 by Gnomon Press.

The Granite Pail is a masterful collection that showcases the poetic brilliance of one of America's most underappreciated modernist poets. Known for its minimalist style and deep connection to the natural world, Niedecker's work combines precision with emotional depth in poems that resonate long after they are read.

This volume brings together some of Niedecker's finest poetry, illustrating her gift for capturing profound truths in the simplest of forms. With themes ranging from the intimate and domestic to the universal and ecological, her poems reflect a life deeply rooted in the landscapes of rural Wisconsin. From meditations on the passage of time to lyrical explorations of nature, The Granite Pail reveals the interplay between solitude, creativity, and the human condition.

Edited and introduced by Cid Corman, a champion of Niedecker's work, the collection highlights her unique voice within the Objectivist tradition and her ability to create moments of beauty and insight with remarkable economy. This edition also provides context for her life and influences, shedding light on her artistic evolution and the lasting significance of her poetry.

For both longtime admirers and those new to Niedecker's work, The Granite Pail offers an essential glimpse into the mind of a poet whose quiet brilliance continues to inspire readers and writers alike.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0917788613
• ISBN13: 9780917788611
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Gnomon Press
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Subtle beauty, American haiku

This intriguing collection of poems has more depth, subtlety and grace than you might expect from a 20th century American poet from Wisconsin. Niedecker is an astute observer of her surroundings, often remembering the ponds and rivers of her youth and early adulthood. These short poems are not small in depth, only in word count, often containing the grace and complexity of haiku with image juxtapositions conveying multiple meanings. Wonderful, easy to read works that will linger long in memory. Highly recommended.

The quiet storm

This is a GREAT book. She lived quietly out in the midwest somewhere, had a media-free, you-might-say-humdrum, but real and normal life, but quietly chiselled TRUTH into her poetry, maybe it should be truth with a small t, because it is all so personal, humble, but above all genuine, so that eventually it is heavy with something. I have loved and returned to her poetry for close to 20 years now, its anti-histrionic quality bringing me home the simple fact of my own being, my fragility in time and my singularity. One of those great women, like Frida Kahlo and Diane Arbus, who made a dent in my being.

More People Should Buy This Book!

It still amazes me that more people who love poetry don't know about the revolutionary, elegant, deceptively simple, simply deceptive, American work of Lorine Niedecker, a quasi-member of the Objectivist movement and a unqiue and solitary figure. A woman writer invested in so many American traditions -- Emily Dickinson's hermetic sensibility, William Carlos Williams' love of the ordinary -- Niedecker is truly one of the great poets of the century. I don't think you'll regret buying this book -- though you'll probably end up complaining, as I do daily, about the lack of a Collected Poems as yet in print.