Straits - Softcover

Koch, Kenneth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375701338 ISBN 13: 9780375701337

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1999

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The poet's first collection since The Art of Love explores themes of ecstasy, unity, freedom, and completeness, among other important themes. Reprint.

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About the Author

Kenneth Koch has published many volumes of poetry, including New Addresses, Straits and One Train. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1995, in 1996 he received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry awarded by the Library of Congress, and he received the first Phi Beta Kappa Poetry award in November of 2001. His short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays. He has also written several books about poetry, including Wishes, Lies, and Dreams; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and, most recently, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. He taught undergraduates at Columbia University for many years. He passed away in 2002

From the Inside Flap

continues to expand the range of what is possible to do in poetry. His title poem is a stirring collection of disconnected and connected sentences on such themes as love, politics, and the exploration of sub-polar seas. "Vous etes plus beaux que vous ne pensiez" is a series of bright, rapid sketches of the lives of ten artists and writers. Writing in a variant of the style of the eighteenth-century poet James Thomson, Koch revives an old genre--praise of the seasons--with his own characteristic mixture of clarity and sensuous excitement. A group of twenty-five poems called "Songs from the Plays" creates a new genre: songs written for plays that don't exist but from which plays might be imagined or constructed. "My Olivetti Speaks" is perhaps Koch's clearest and wittiest meditation on the nature of poetry itself. The themes of time and change in individual lives are given an unusual look in "Study of Time" and the Villon-like "Ballade."

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