<![CDATA[Collected Poems]]>

false <![CDATA[Collected Poems]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176735385m/648052.jpg 648052 2 Born in Chicago in 1923, the late James Schuyler gravitated early on to Manhattan, where he came to be associated with such stalwarts of the New York School as Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Yet his work--unlike, say, Ashbery's, with whom he wrote a novel, A Nest of Ninnies--is eminently accessible. Indeed, Schuyler's Collected Poems functions as an exquisite illustration of how to write poetry with a crystal-clear surface. And he always remains a master of the light touch, even when he himself is in desperate straits. In Schuyler's long pieces, such as "Hymn to Life," "The Morning of the Poem," and "A Few Days," he casually reverses the romantic position: anti-didactic, anti-epiphanic, he trusts his imagination and resists any psychological theorizing about why one memory, one perception, is connected to another. He mistrusts monumentality. Wisdom, he knows, is enervating: "Things should get better as you / grow older, but that / is not the way. The way is inscrutable and hard to / handle." But long or short, Collected Poems is a record of discoveries, and each one is marked by Schuyler's terrific antennae and gift of tonal rightness. (The same qualities are on ample, if more casual, display in the poet's diary.) There's no question that he is among the most formidable and most observant poets of postwar America. Indeed, his attractively quotidian elegy for W.H. Auden is a far more subtle poem than the endlessly quoted tour de force that Auden dedicated to W.B. Yeats: <blockquote> I don't have to burn his letters as he asked his friends to do: they were lost a long time ago. So much to remember, so little to say: that he liked martinis and was greedy about the wine? I always thought he would live to a great age. He did not. Wystan, kind man and great poet, goodbye. </blockquote> Nobody thought that James Schuyler would live to a great age. But the death of this "kind man and great poet" in 1991 felt no less cruelly premature. --Mark Rudman 634192 1993 Collected Poems total:103|5:70|4:21|3:9|2:3|1:0| 103 467 141 6 0 0 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Thu Feb 21 07:43:33 -0800 2008 Wed Feb 27 07:41:25 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1996 Sat Jan 24 16:55:22 -0800 2009 Sat Jan 24 16:56:22 -0800 2009 2 0 false false Wed Aug 01 12:21:58 -0700 2007 Mon Dec 15 20:43:32 -0800 2008 5 0 false false Fri Nov 02 09:32:10 -0700 2007 Fri Nov 02 09:32:10 -0700 2007 5 0 false false Tue Aug 12 16:20:49 -0700 2008 Tue Aug 12 16:21:35 -0700 2008 5 0 false false Wed Oct 31 19:52:54 -0700 2007 Wed Oct 31 19:53:04 -0700 2007 0 0 false false Wed Nov 25 22:58:47 -0800 2009 Wed Nov 25 22:58:47 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Thu Nov 12 20:03:31 -0800 2009 Thu Nov 12 20:03:31 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Mon Nov 02 07:13:14 -0800 2009 Mon Nov 02 07:13:51 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Fri Oct 30 18:13:42 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 30 18:13:42 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Oct 08 12:15:26 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 08 12:15:26 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Fri Sep 04 19:45:19 -0700 2009 Fri Sep 04 19:45:19 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Jul 30 14:24:54 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 30 14:24:54 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Wed Jul 22 05:56:16 -0700 2009 Wed Jul 22 05:56:16 -0700 2009 2 0 false false Sat Jul 18 04:04:03 -0700 2009 Sat Jul 18 04:04:03 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Mon Jul 06 12:40:01 -0700 2009 Mon Jul 06 12:40:08 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Mon Jun 15 07:34:30 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 15 07:34:33 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1998 Sun May 31 14:33:23 -0700 2009 Sun May 31 14:34:05 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Tue May 26 21:59:49 -0700 2009 Tue May 26 21:59:49 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Fri May 08 12:15:17 -0700 2009 Fri May 08 12:15:17 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=648052