Robert Morgan's welcome Collected Early Poems presents in one volume the contents of his first four full-length books, which appeared in steady succession over the course of a decade. His remarkable debut, Zirconia Poems, was published by Lillabulero Press in 1969, when he was only twenty-four. A li...

Robert Morgan's welcome Collected Early Poems presents in one volume the contents of his first four full-length books, which appeared in steady succession over the course of a decade. His remarkable debut, Zirconia Poems, was published by Lillabulero Press in 1969, when he was only twenty-four. A limited edition chapbook titled The Voice in the Crosshairs was brought out by the Angelfish Press in 1971; nearly all those poems (joined with many more) soon saw wider distribution as part of Red Owl, released by W. W. Norton in 1972. In 1976, LSU Press published Land Diving, which gathered the first poems Morgan wrote after starting what would become a fifty-year career teaching at Cornell University. L'Epervier Press issued Trunk & Thicket in 1978; its author was still only thirty-three, an age by which Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens had yet to produce their first volumes. (from Introduction by Robert W West)