Publisher's Synopsis
Frank O'Hara, one of the most delightful and radical poets of the century, has influenced a generation of writers.
With his unpremeditated, fresh style, his observations and his autobiographical - not confessional - poetry, he broke with the academic traditions of the 1950s and became the life of soul of New York school of poets, depicting a city of 'jazz, good painting and black-and-white movies'.
For this volume Donald Allen has selected some of the finest work of Frank O'Hara (1926-66). Offbeat, vivid and spontaneous, O'Hara's poetry broke with the dry orthodoxy of the current trend to create a fluid poetry, analogous in concept to the paintings of Pollock, Kline and de Kooning. It is, according to John Ashbery, 'a remarkable poetry - both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it - not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space'.
'Wonderful original poems ... He was an essential contact-man between the worlds of painting and of poetry. And he suggested a rich and fascinating dialogue between them' - Eavan Boland in the Irish Times
'Personal but not confessional, free but not unconfined ... For me the charm and vivacity of his best poems persist' - C.K.Stead in the London Review of Books
