Poet Louis Zukofsky sought to encapsulate the experience of being alive. He was a member of the second wave of Modernist poets, one of the Objectivist poets attempting to create poetry defined by sincerity and clarification. His work is closely related to that of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and he strongly influenced the later Black Mountain and Beat poets such as Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn and influential poet and editor Cid Corman.

Zukofsky worked most of his life in relative obscurity except among his fellow poets. His reputation has grown rapidly since his death in 1978. After a series of short volumes of his work, Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems (Library of America, $20) is the culmination of the current interest in the poet.

Charles Bernstein undertook a monumental task in editing this collection. He was forced to pare down around 1,100 pages of poetry into a representative 150-page book. With a writer as diverse as Zukofsky, there is no way an editor could represent every side of his work, so Bernstein practically had to choose which image of Zukofsky was most important to the general public and cut large masses of indispensable poems.

The resulting volume presents most of the major sections of “A,” his enormous 24-section poem he worked on throughout his entire adult life, as well as several important shorter poems. However, two poems very central to Zukofsky’s body of work, “Mantis” and “Motet,” were questionable exclusions.

Still, the volume creates a more accessible collection for contemporary Zukofsky readers.