Kenneth Koch has been called "one of our greatest poets" by John
Ashbery, and "a national treasure" in the 2000 National Book Award
Finalist Citation.
Now, for the first time, all of the poems in his ten
collections-from "Sun Out," poems of the 1950s, to "Thank You,"
published in 1962, to "A Possible World," published in 2002, the
year of the poet's death-are gathered in one volume.
Celebrating the pleasures of friendship, art, and love, the poetry
of Kenneth Koch has been dazzling readers for fifty years. Charter
member-along with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler-of
the New York School of poets, avant-garde playwright and fiction
writer, pioneer teacher of writing to children, Koch gave us some
of the most exciting and aesthetically daring poems of his
generation.
These poems take sensuous delight in the life of the mind and the
heart, often at the same time: "O what a physical effect it has on
me / To dive forever into the light blue sea / Of your
acquaintance!" ("In Love with You").
Here is Koch's early work: love poems like "The Circus" and "To
Marina" and such well-remembered comic masterpieces as "Fresh Air,"
"Some General Instructions," and "The Boiling Water" ("A serious
moment for the water is when it boils"). And here are the brilliant
later poems-"One Train May Hide Another," the deliciously
autobiographical address in "New Addresses," and the stately elegy
"Bel Canto"-poems that, beneath a surface of lightness and wit,
speak with passion, depth, and seriousness to all the most
important moments in one's existence.
Charles Simic wrote in "The New York Review of Books" that, for
Koch, poetry "has to be constantly saved from itself. The idea is
to do something with language that has never been done before." In
the ten exuberant, hilarious, and heartbreaking books of poems
collected here, Kenneth Koch does exactly that.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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