New Addresses: Poems - Softcover

Koch, Kenneth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375709126 ISBN 13: 9780375709128

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

Kenneth Koch, who has already considerably "stretched our ideas of what it is possible to do in poetry" (David Lehman), here takes on the classic poetic device of apostrophe, or direct address. His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse and, as well, to bring new life to a form in which Donne talked to Death, Shelley to the West Wind, Whitman to the Earth, Pound to his Songs, O'Hara to the Sun at Fire Island.  

Koch, in this new book, talks to things important in his life -- to Breath, to World War Two, to Orgasms, to the French Language, to Jewishness, to Psychoanalysis, to Sleep, to his Heart, to Friendship, to High Spirits, to his Twenties, to the Unknown. He makes of all these "new addresses" an exhilarating autobiography of a most surprising and unforeseeable kind.

About this title

From the Publisher

A superb achievement in poetic autobiography . . . the forces of celebration gain the upper hand over the forces of despair . . . beautiful and moving."
--The Wall Street Journal

"There is nothing like New Addresses in American poetry. Formal and free, personal and wise, by turns ebullient and melancholy, it suggests an upbeat Leopardi or an American Montaigne. Koch has wedded the virtues of old and new sensibilities into a scintillating, vigorous, surprising. life-giving poetry. It's a great book."
-- Philip Lopate

"New Addresses contains some of this ineffable poet's finest work to date....This masterful 16th collection finds Koch...directly addressing a variety of life's trials and tribulations... Blending nuanced echoes of O'Hara, Stevens and Max Jacob, Koch has managed to create a form and inflection that takes on the variousness of the poet's life with startling movement and without the least bit of decaying bathos."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Koch's laid-back rhetoric, conversational idiom and formal looseness tease out, with surprising skill and frequency, wisdom. It's as though the codger next door who spins yarns from his porch swing suddenly started talking like Socrates."
-- Kansas City Star

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 died in 2002.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375709126
• ISBN 13: 9780375709128
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 96