"For the last thirty years or more, Kenneth Koch has been writing the
most exuberant poems in America. In an arena where such good spirits are
rare, he has become a national treasure. In his book of personal
addresses to what has mattered most in his seventy-plus years on the
planet, there is a dimension of pathos and joy rare in the poetry of any
era." --National Book Award (2000) finalist citation for New Addresses
The three long poems -- "Bel Canto," "Possible World," and "A Memoir" --
in this brilliant successor to New Addresses are ambitious attempts at
rendering the complete story of a life. Taken together they present a
dazzling picture of the pleasures and confusions of existence, as well
as the pleasures and difficulties of expressing them.
Other poems bring Koch's questioning, lyrical attention to more
particular aspects of experience, real and imagined--a shipboard
meeting, the Moor not taken, or the unknowable realm of mountaintops. As
in all of Koch's work, one hears the music of unconquerable exuberance
in stormy conflict with whatever resists it--death, the injustice of
power, the vagaries of life in Thailand, China, or Rome.
Thomas Disch has written in the Boston Book Review that "Koch is the
most capable technician on the American scene, the brightest wit, and
the emeritus most likely to persist into the next millennium . . . His
work is full of ribaldry and wit, musicianship, pitch-perfect mimicry of
the Great Tradition, and the celebration of pleasure for its own sunlit
sake."
The ebullience and stylistic variety that one has come to expect of this
protean poet is everywhere present in this scintillating collection.
