The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo

Wry and witty poems from an avant-garde great, collected in one volume for the first time.

The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo gathers over five decades of the poet’s multifaceted work into one elegant volume. All of Hollo’s trademark humor, wisdom, and charm is on display here for students and fans of contemporary poetry. Warm, insightful, and delightfully observant, this comprehensive collection from the author of over forty books serves as a reminder that poetry isn’t just an aspiration or avocation, but a way of life.

Poet and translator Anselm Hollo (1934–2013) was born in Helsinki, Finland, and moved to London in 1958 to work in the Finnish section of the BBC World Service. He was in the foreground of the small press movement of the early 1960s, writing, giving readings, and publishing widely, all the while freelance translating poetry and prose from Finnish, Swedish, German, and French into his chosen language—English. After moving to the USA at the end of the decade, he became an itinerant professor, meeting and making friends with poets across America. In 1990, he began his professorship in the Writing and Poetics Department at Naropa University.

Hollo was the author of more than forty books of poetry, including Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: New and Selected Poems 1965–2000 (2001), which won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award; Corvus (1995); Finite Continued (1980); and Sojourner Microcosms: New and Selected Poems 1959–1997 (1997). He also published a book of essays, Caws and Causeries: Around Poetry and Poets (1999). His many translations include works by Paavo Haavikko and Pentti Saarikoski, for whose Trilogy (2003) he was awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Prize by the Academy of American Poets. His final work, The Tortoise of History, was published posthumously in 2016.