Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
About the Book
Reviews
"During the halcyon days of the Abstract Expressionist and Imaginative Realism movements, Frank O'Hara was the laureate of the New York art scene. . . . A Pan piping on city streets, he luxuriates in the uninhibited play of his imagination. 'My force is in mobility,' he remarks, and indeed his world is full of events—parties, thoughtful acts, homosexual encounters, a painting or film to be commented on—that he reports with a sophisticated naive wonder and generous emotion."—Herbert A. Liebowitz, New York Times
"O'Hara's work seems to me to represent the last stage in the adaptation of twentieth-century avant-garde sensibility to poetry about contemporary American experience. In its music and its language and in its conception of the relation of poetry to the rest of life, it is a poetry which has already changed poets and others, and which promises to go on moving and changing them for a long time to come."—Kenneth Koch, New Republic
"Slangy and sharp, genially surreal, the work of the quintessential New York poet shines like polished granite."—Entertainment Weekly