Poems Retrieved (City Lights/Grey Fox)

Good read

By JACK ANDERSONWhereas some poets produce poems with almost painful slowness, poems just seem to gush from other writers. Frank O'Hara was one of the 20th century's great poetic gushers. He just seemingly couldn't make his chatterbox of a muse shut up. His Collected Poems published in 1971 is an enormous volume. And now Donald Allen, his editor, his assembled more thank 200 pages of poetry that have come to light since then -- that's as much as the collected writings of many a more verbally stingy poet. These poems are good to have, and I'm glad to have read them. Yet I don't think we have any previously undiscovered masterpieces. O'Hara's sheer verbosity always made his writings wildly variable in quality (some of those included here are silly, others are awful),Readers new to his work who want to encounter him at his best should turn to his Collected or Selected Poems to discover what the fuss over him is all about. Nevertheless, this is an instructive assemblage from which other writers -- young ones especially, but also older ones growing set in their ways -- could learn much: Be bold. Dare. Be willing to try things out. (And, yes, be willing to risk silliness and failure.) O'Hara was always willing to take risks. Here are poems in an astonishing variety of forms: free verse, rhymed couplets, sonnets, sestinas, eclogues, prose poems, dialogues, you name it. Many exhibit the jittery breathlessness of pace that was always a characteristic of his poetry: if some writers are poets of the heart and others are poets of the head, O'Hara was a poet of the nerves His poems are caffeinated, and in tone he could range from grandiloquence to casual campiness. Few of these retrieved poems may be memorable, but most are worth looking at. So it's good they've been retrieved.

Lots of poems but some clearly unfinished

Poems Retrieved by Frank O'Hara is a wonderful book, though I have only read about a third of it... I have read the complete book of his Completed Poems, which I can attest is an excellent and necessary part of any serious poetry reader's library. Lunch Poems is an excellent compilation in a handy volume too.Allen Hagar

This is one of my favorite poets, and I am glad to add this collection of previously unpublished poems in my collection. The bookstore that I bought it from via Amazon provide prompt service.

Furthers the collected poems with a kind of O'Hara apocrypha of non-standard works. Well worth acquiring, there are several poems here that are favourites of mine.