A possible world

About this book

A brilliant follow-up to Koch's award-winning New Addresses. The three long poems in this book are ambitious attempts at rendering the complete story of a life. Taken together they present a dazzling picture of the pleasures and confusions of existence, as well as the pleasures and difficulties of expressing them. Other poems bring Koch's questioning, lyrical attention to more particular aspects of experience, real and imagined -- a shipboard meeting, the Moor not taken, or the unknowable realm of mountaintops. As in all of Koch's work, one hears the music of unconquerable exuberance in stormy conflict with whatever resists it -- death, the injustice of power, the vagaries of life in Thailand, China, or Rome. The ebullience and stylistic variety that one has come to expect of this protean poet -- called a "national treasure" in his NBA finalist's citation -- is everywhere present in this stunning new collection.