Robert Duncan (1919-88) was a lyric poet with a universal vision whose knowledge of art and poetics ran as deep as his humanity. He once wrote: “The storehouse of a human experience in words is resonant too, and we have but to listen to the reverberations of our first thought in the reservoir of communal meanings to strike such depths as touch upon the center of man’s nature.” A Selected Prose represents the most wide-ranging collection to date of his essays and talks and is a companion volume to the Selected Poems (1993). Editor Robert J. Bertholf has taken three core essays from Fictive Certainties (1985), an earlier prose collection that was limited to works written after 1955; to these have been added a variety of Duncan’s writings on contemporary artists and such fellow poets as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer.