Sally's Hair

by John Koethe

Let me stay there for a while, while evening
Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.
There's something in the air, something I can't quite see,
Hiding behind this stock of images, this language
Culled from all the poems I've ever loved.

John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death."

Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "Eros and the Everyday." This is followed by "The Unlasting," a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "The Maquiladoras" and "Poetry and the War." This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "Proust" and "HAMLET."

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

John Koethe is an American poet, essayist and professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Koethe is originally from San Diego, California. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University.Koethe's published work includes Blue Vents (Audit/Poetry, 1969), Domes (Columbia University Press, 1973), The Late Wisconsin Spring (Princeton University Press, 1984), The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (Cornell University Press, 1996), Falling Water (HarperPerennial, 1997), The Constructor, (HarperFlamingo, 1999), Poetry at One Remove (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2002). His most recent books include Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 2005), Sally's Hair (HarperCollins, 2006), Ninety-fifth Street (Harper Parennial, 2009) and ROTC Kills (Harper Perennial, 2012).

Koethe has also contributed poetry and essays to publications including Poetry, Paris Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Parnassus, and Art News.His work has been included in anthologies of poetry, including The Best American Poetry (2003).Additionally, he was selected to contribute his views on contemporary poetry for the book Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, which billed him as one of "85 leading contemporary poets."

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a place existing only in the mind, or minds,
Approachable through memory or art, an aesthetic counterpart.
Of that imaginary world Kant called the Realm of Ends,
That answers only to the laws of its creation. It begins,
If it begins anywhere, in childhood - in a story out of Poe,
Or in a church, or in a private moment glowing with the sense,
Not so much of another life, as that this one is wanting-
Which is also where it ends.
*
I took the past for granted. I forgot
How much of it we fabricate,how much
Of my life is actually a story
Mixing what I want and what I believe
With some words that retell it from within.
*
Let me stay there for a while, while evening
Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems kick ass.

These word-worms got a dozens of hearts.

You could engrave these onto a shield and I'm sure they'd be able to withstand quite the battering.

I memorized one of them for good luck (and to get me out of a pinch)

These poems are so lofty the reader will likely cough clouds. I sure did. (I had my roommate identify the clouds shape, and these object became helpful omens throughout the day. The wretched day.)

I think Brahma would like Koethe's style. Don't you? They seem like they'd be buds.

These poems, and here's the weird part, I think they change over night. I went to reread one...it was completely different. Same words, maybe, but whole different vibe. Yesterdays mirror now today's window.

When, when Norway decides on a new national anthem and they use one of the these bad boys for the lyrics, well, they'll know then won't they, they certainly will at that.

Yes, I'm putting all my money on Koethe. I called up Milwaukee the other day and said, "I'd like to put all my stocks in Koethe poetry, yes that's right, all of!" They said, "Sir, we have no idea what you're talking about." Then I came here and started writing this.

Perhaps, we'll all look back at this moment, before the Koethe Shields, and Norway Anthem, before sales of Koethe poetry skyrocketed to the sun, we'll think, "Man that Koethe guy, he really wrote about time and memory a lot. He wrote the hell out of them. It's like they were Resource and Poverty and his poems are the Love child of this union (But!, that's a sneak-peak preview for my Plato Symposium review which will be released soon!)

They're like salvia for the soul!

[Darrin Kramer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philosophical meanderings of life that comes full circle, realizing that everything is a variation of what has gone on before, trying to find something new in the continuum of life and how we sum up the whole of one's life. In the poem: "In The Dark" he says: "An unshed tear for what never happened or that happens now too late. No disappointments, just amazement at how much there is to see and how little it all matters-"

Yet, there is a feeling that reconciliation for where we have been, are and will be is at the height of those words.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful poems. This is the sort of book of poetry to read if you don't typically read poetry, since it's so difficult to "get" you can stop worrying about getting it and do something else with it.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled through the first section of the book, but later sections had me hooked.

There are some fantastic lines, particularly in "The Unlasting."

[Megan Snyder-camp · Rating 3 out of 5]

if John Ashbery's little brother was Robert Hass

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even line rings true, but so boringly, so yawningly (and not in a good way.)