Barrytown/StationHill Publishing

Call Steps brings together three collections of a celebrated American poet, representing the years during which Irby wrote what critics consider his most powerful visionary work.

“No one I know has ever rooted down and plumbed the mystery of American places, land, name, history of our taking space, as Irby does. No one I know has so clearly articulated the living fact, that America is an intelligent thing, and that the distances between purslane and elderberry wine and the bowling alley and Silicon Valley are not inferences of a fall, but are the still arising magniloquences of the sonorous madness of the Platonists, a mystical/musical tradition so close to nonsense that it’s the only sense we dare trust. That each human being has a grasp of the sensuous, and that is empire. That each human person has a root awareness of the inadequacy of this place, and that is vision. Europe is only a song we still drift west from. No poet I know speaks that psychic geology of our westering better than Kenneth Irby.” -Robert Kelly