On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988

In this new selection of the poetry of Kenneth Koch - "one of our greatest poets" (John Ashbery) - Koch's brilliance, aesthetic daring, and virtuosity are everywhere apparent. Included here are selections from his book-length narrative poems, Ko and The Duplications, and from his dazzlingly incomprehensible (by ordinary means), fractured epic When the Sun Tries to Go On; poetic plays such as Pericles, Guinivere, Bertha, and six of his One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays; "instructional" poems - from The Art of Love - in which an old genre is splendidly revived; lyric, satiric, and sympathetic poems on the state of the arts - "Fresh Air" and "The Artist"; radically inventive love poems - "West Wind," "To Marina," "With Janice"; and the memorable autobiographical poems "On the Edge" and "Seasons of the Earth."