The Whole Song

With a voice emerging from class tensions, labor struggles, the Great Depression, and World War II, Vincent Ferrini lived as a people's poet crying out for an end to exploitation and organized greed. Radical Christian gnosis and the conviction that poetry should be more than a display of word-craft distinguished him from poets like T. S. Eliot, infusing his work with dynamic images of Christ as a fighter, a revolutionary, and a martyr in opposing the mighty for the sake of the poor.''The range of these poems is surprising and generally delightful as well as descriptive of the many-sided life of an admirable man of the people who also has an intensely personal, even spiritual life. Ferrini is a poet of the heart who writes with great visceral power. Never sentimental or solipsistic, his poems finely transcend the personal to reach out to broad themes.''--Robert W. Lewis, editor of the North Dakota Quarterly ''This long-overdue collection, aided by an insightful introduction, stands as a vital testament to a poet whose work is always fresh and interesting.''--John Crawford, director of the Honors Program of the University of New Mexico at Valencia and coeditor of This Is About Vision and Western Literature in a World ContextVincent Ferrini published the first poems of his long career in the 1930s. He edited Four Winds, a literary journal, in the 1950s. For many years he was a close friend of the late Charles Olson and of Robert Creeley, and he has numerous acquaintances in literary circles. A resident of Gloucester, Massachussetts since 1948, his papers have been deposited with the University of Connecticut and his late papers have been deposited with the Cape Ann Historical Museum. Kenneth A. Warren is director of the Lakewood Public Library in Lakewood, Ohio, and the founder and editor of House Organ, a letter of poetry and prose. Fred Whitehead is the author or editor of a number of scholarly articles and books on intellectual and cultural history, including Freethought on the American Frontier. He is also the editor of Don Gordon's Collected Poems. He lives in Kansas City.