The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch

Now, for the primary time, the entire poems in his ten collections–from
Solar Out, poems of the Fifties, to
Thank You, revealed in 1962, to
A Doable World, revealed in 2002, the 12 months of the poet’s loss of life–are gathered in a single quantity.

Celebrating the pleasures of friendship, artwork, and love, the poetry of Kenneth Koch has been dazzling readers for 50 years. Constitution member–together with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler–of the New York College of poets, avant-garde playwright and fiction author, pioneer instructor of writing to youngsters, Koch gave us among the most enjoyable and aesthetically daring poems of his era.

These poems take sensuous delight within the lifetime of the thoughts and the center, typically on the identical time: “O what a bodily impact it has on me / To dive perpetually into the sunshine blue sea / Of your acquaintance!” (“In Love with You”).

Right here is Koch’s early work: love poems like “The Circus” and “To Marina” and such well-remembered comedian masterpieces as “Contemporary Air,” “Some Normal Directions,” and “The Boiling Water” (“A critical second for the water is when it boils”). And listed here are the sensible later poems–“One Prepare Could Disguise One other,” the deliciously autobiographical deal with in
New Addresses, and the stately elegy “Bel Canto”–poems that, beneath a floor of lightness and wit, communicate with ardour, depth, and seriousness to all a very powerful moments in a single’s existence.

Charles Simic wrote in
The New York Assessment of Books that, for Koch, poetry “needs to be always saved from itself. The concept is to do one thing with language that has by no means been finished earlier than.” Within the ten exuberant, hilarious, and heartbreaking books of poems collected right here, Kenneth Koch does precisely that.