The American poet Robert Lax belongs to the generation of Thomas Merton, Beat poetry, Abstract Expressionism, and the compositions of John Cage. Yet he stands out as this era's most intriguing minimalist poet, gaining this reputation through a constant questioning of the universe and our idea about it. His poetry varies from fables and parables to clear-cut columns of words, from his account of a day at the circus as a vision of creation to his own insistent and mystical search for truth. 33 Poems presents the quintessential gathering of Lax's work, including Sea & Sky and The Circus of the Sun, "perhaps the greatest English-language poem of this century" (The New York Times).

"Among America's greatest poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words." -Richard Kostelanetz, New York Times Book Review Every generation of poets seems to harbor its own hidden genius, one whose stature and brilliance come to light after his talent has already been achieved and exercised. The same drama of obscurity and nuance that attended the discovery of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens is suggested by the career of Robert Lax. An expatriate American whose work to date more than forty books has been published mostly in Europe, this 85-year-old poet built a following in the U.S. among figures as widespread as Mark Van Doren, e. e. cummings, Jack Kerouac, and Sun Ra. The works in Love Had a Compass represent every stage of Lax's development as a poet, from his early years in the 1940s as a staff writer for The New Yorker to his present life on the Greek Island of Patmos. An inveterate wanderer, Lax's own sense of himself as both exile and pilgrim is carefully evoked in his prose journals and informs the pages of the Marseille Diaries, published here for the first time. Together with the poems, they provide the best portrait available to date of one of the most striking and original poets of our age.

"One of the great original voices of our times--a pilgrim in search of beautiful innocence."--Jack Kerouac

"Robert Lax's poems prove] yet again that the gift to be simple is the gift to be free, that less is more, and that least may sometimes be most."--John Ashbery

"Poems (1962-1997)" gathers thirty-five years of Robert Lax's work, rarely published and largely composed in solitude on the island of Patmos. Compiled and edited by the poet's former assistant John Beer, this selection reflects--through meditative sequences in striking vertical columns--Lax's rigorous attention to the world around him and his relentless aspiration to new ways of writing.

"love &
death"

"are blood
& bone"

"love &
death"

"are bread
& stone"

"love &
death
are rose
& thorn"

"(love &
death"

"are sheep
& shorn)"

Robert Lax (1915-2000) published dozens of volumes of poetry and prose with small presses and worked as an editor for the "New Yorker," "Jubilee," and "PAX." From 1962 to the end of his life, he made his home in the Greek islands.

John Beer is the author of "The Waste Land and Other Poems" (Canarium, 2010), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. For two years in the late 1990s, he served as literary assistant to Robert Lax. He currently lives and teaches in Oregon.