SOURCE: A review of “Primitive,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4,029, June 13, 1980, p. 682.

In the following review, Young praises Oppen for his “independent thought and visionary inventiveness.”

Black Sparrow Press is one of the West Coast publishing houses dedicated to the promotion of avant-garde American poetry and prose. “Avant-garde”, for Black Sparrow, includes work by and about writers such as Charles Bukowski, Paul Goodman, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Creeley and George Oppen. There is some reference to 1920s expatriates—Gertrude Stein and Harry Crosby, for instance. In the monthly Sparrow (1972-1978) there used to be much reference to the European avant-garde between the two World Wars, especially to Antonin Artaud, but such European modernist underpinning has recently disappeared. Black Sparrow has moved further towards a high-minded seriousness about both the distinctively new and the distinctively American. Standards of book-design and printing are consistently fine and imaginative, and the press is...