“Robert Duncan had the finest ear this side of Dante,” wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti after Duncan’s death in 1988. And Duncan, like Dante, was a poet of cosmic imagination, intensely aware of his and poetry’s role in the ever-expanding logos of creation. His Selected Poems is an essential retrospective of works chosen from the whole course of his writing life as primary examples of his guiding attention as a poet. From Duncan’s early poems through his final Ground Work collections, as well as his serial poems, “Structures of Rime” and “Passages,” composed over the course of twenty-five years, there emerges a prophetic voice of great perception. In the words of editor Robert J. Bertholf, “Duncan insisted on the value of the poem, the force of love in the human community, and the revelation of mythological presences in everyday events.”