Unearthing Paul Auster’s Poetry James Peacock, Keele University Little critical attention has been paid to Paul Auster’s poetry. Reviewers of the recent Collected Poems tended to treat the work as an archaeological curiosity, as evidence of a young writer struggling to find the voice which would eventually allow him to write his more commercially and critically successful novels. This article argues for the intrinsic merits of the poems, and explores the ways in which Auster’s verse deals with the question of the poet’s relationship with the past. The past, these poems show, takes many forms: it includes Auster’s literary ancestors, but also the national past and Native American civilisations. Keywords: Paul Auster’s poetry, the past, influence, the frontier. Paul Auster the poet, it is fair to say, has attracted considerably less scholarly or popular attention than Paul Auster the novelist, Paul Auster the movie-maker and Paul Auster the New York celebrity with hip friends like Lou Reed and Jim Jarmusch. Yet between 1974 and 1980 he published six poetry collections: Unearth (1974), Effigies (1976), Wall Writing (1976), Fragments from Cold (1977), Facing the Music (1980) and the prose poem White Spaces (1980). His poems were first anthologised in Disappearances (1988), and in 2004 Overlook Press published his Collected Poems. Reading the author’s own reflections, it is tempting to regard the poetry primarily as an exercise in intense self-discipline. In an interview with the author of this article, he says: ‘I set very high stakes for myself very young, and it was very difficult. I consciously reduced the range of imagery I was going to allow myself to work with.’ 1 Hence the characteristic ‘difficulty’, the restriction of the interpretive routes into the poems through the narrow range of obsessively recurring images: stones, earth, walls, eyes, the mouth. Critics have tended to concur with Auster’s analysis and view the trajectory of his career as a gradual Orbis Litterarum 64:5 413–437, 2009 Printed in Malaysia. All rights reserved