Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts

Samuel Bernard Greenberg (1893–1917) was born in the Jewish ghetto in Vienna, Austria, and settled with his family in Lower East Side of Manhattan at age seven. He contracted tuberculosis and died at twenty-three. Garrett Caples is the author of Power Ballads, Retrievals, The Garrett Caples Reader, Complications, and Quintessence of the Minor. He edits the Spotlight Poetry Series at City Lights Books. James Laughlin (1914–1997) founded New Directions in 1936 while still a student at Harvard. He wrote and compiled more than a dozen books of poetry as well as stories and essays; seven volumes of his correspondence with his authors are available from W.W. Norton.

"His favorite word for what he sought in poetry was “charm,” and perhaps his most pervasive quality is an alluring whimsicality...Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts is, as Caples puts it, “a reasonable stop-gap, as a way to bring this work before a new generation of readers.” As stop-gaps go, it has a great deal to recommend it. Laughlin’s volume, with its still-vivid essay and thoughtful selection of 22 of Greenberg’s lyrics, remains a classic, and Caples has supplemented it with 10 more poems and three prose pieces, including “Between Historical Life,” Greenberg’s moving autobiographical narrative."