John Koethe – författare

"I prize John Koethe''s intimate expanses and unsettling reveries, his tender contemplations and odd mental landscapes. He is an heir to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and, like them, he gives us the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting, daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and held aloft."-- Edward Hirsch

North Point North: New and Selected Poems showcases the work of an important contemporary American poet, winner of the prestigious Kingsley-Tufts Award for Poetry.

The volume opens with twenty-one new poems, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other periodicals, and in The Best American Poems 2001, edited by Robert Hass and David Lehman. Following are selections from Koethe''s five earlier collections of poems: Blue Vents, Domes, The Late Wisconsin Spring, The Constructor, and Falling Water. Together these poems create a remarkable and powerful new volume, a milestone in this gifted poet''s career.

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."

"To describe with unpromising candor the inner life of a man adrift in the waning of the 20th century is one thing, but to do it without a shred of self-pity is another. The poems of his new book, Falling Water, are like no one else''s. In them, even the most extreme exertions of consciousness are transformed into the luminous measures of beautiful speech." --Mark Strand

"In this ambitious volume, the magnificent poet who gave us The Late Wisconsin Spring moves ever more swiftly and surefootedly into the deepest regions of self-invention: the past -- few poets write more accurately and painfully about that uncanny estranged place that never finds its way out of us; the present, or idea of the present, as mere projection, and yet a projection so poignantly, materially, tenderly touched it gleams with all its claustrophobic distances; and the future...''I wish that time could bring the future back again/And let me see things as they used to seem to me/Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state--/Alone and free and filled...'' With its low-key blank verse, its apparently casual manner of speech, its digressions, asides, recollections -- with all its taking its time -- this is a poetry of magnificent undertow, all proximity of thought, singularity of contemplation, protest, pretext, reflection -- all disenchantment and then, suddenly, blazing re-enchantment, with the newly, lovingly, seen-through real." --Jorie Graham

A rich, meditative new collection of poetry from John Koethe, the "necessary and great poet" (Hyperallergic).It’s presumptuous, but if you’re reading this youProbably know my usual obsessions and preoccupations:The “world”—both the word and what it stands for—and time,Which is or isn’t real, depending on my mood. I’ve alwaysHated poems about philosophy, and I hope I still do,But since I don’t know what that means anymore, here I am,Musing on my ends and my beginnings one more time . . .In Beyond Belief, John Koethe poses eternal and essential questions about the rhythms of time, language and literature, and “the space between attention and belief.” The eleventh book of poetry from America’s philosopher-poet is an intimate, searching collection that gives life to the mundane and lends words to our most interior and abstract musings. What makes a life real? Words on a page, the accumulation of moments and memories, or nothing at all? And what is a life worth? Locked inside, have we lost our future and its promises or are we merely pressed to inhabit our present and ourselves?The award-winning poet invites us into his consideration of our world, as “An ordinary person sitting on his balcony on a summer afternoon, / Waiting patiently for someone to explain it to and meanwhile / Living quietly in his imagination, imagining the afterlife.”

John Koethe unravels timeless questions of death, math, meaning, and much more in this mesmerizing collection. John Koethe, one of our most philosophically sophisticated poets, has written a book of pithy, contentious, witty poems about our perennial, never-satisfied search for meaning. The silent mysteries of the stars and the mute beauty of human graves have deep similarities that Koethe probes in these poems with a wondering, wandering gimlet eye that will delight the reader when they don’t terrify them. Cemeteries and Galaxies is an extraordinarily provocative and, perhaps surprisingly, consoling book.