"Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a
provocatively persistent wonder."--Robert Creeley
Ron Padgett has reenergized modern poetry with exuberant and tender love
poems, with exceptionally lucid and touching elegies, and with
imaginative and action-packed homages to American culture and visual
art. He has paid tribute to Woody Woodpecker and the West, to friends
and collaborators, to language and cowslips, to beautiful women and
chocolate milk, to paintings and small-time criminals. His poems have
always imparted a contagious sense of joy.
In this new collection of poems, Padgett hasn't forsaken his beloved
Woody Woodpecker, but he has decided to heed the canary and sound the
alarm. Here, he asks, "What makes us so mean?" And he really wants to
know. Even as these poems cajole and question, as they call attention to
what has been lost and what we still stand to lose, they continue to
champion what makes sense and what has always been worth saving.
"Humanity," Padgett generously (and gently) reminds us, still "has to
take it one step at a time."