"John Koethe's The Constructor is a scrupulous, elegant account of the meditative intellect as an instrument continually registering the passage of time. Exquisitely modulated and brutally honest, these poems would be harrowing were they not so seductively beautiful. No one writing in this country today sees as deeply as Koethe into the tears that lie at the heart of things, and no contemporary investigation of the life of the mind may be called complete that does not accommodate the lush intricacy of his terrifying recognitions." -- George Bradley
"I prize John Koethe's intimate expanses and unsettling reveries, his tender contemplations and odd mental landscapes. He is an heir to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and, like them, he gives us the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting, daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and held aloft." -- Edward Hirsch

The Constructor: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Koethe, John

Poetry

Harper

Superbly written and profoundly engrossing, this collection of poems about time, memory, and the soul is the first book in eleven years from one of the most important poets at work today--multi-award winner John Koethe. FALLING WATER is a major literary event from a poet at the height of his maturity.

Falling Water: Poems

Perennial

Let me stay there for a while, while evening Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills. There's something in the air, something I can't quite see, Hiding behind this stock of images, this language Culled from all the poems I've ever loved.
John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death."
Of all Koethe's books, Sally's Hair is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics, and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "Eros and the Everyday." This is followed by "The Unlasting," a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "The Maquiladoras" and "Poetry and the War." This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems and recollections, including the gems "Proust" and "Hamlet."

Sally's Hair: Poems

United States

North Point North: New and Selected Poems showcases the work of an important contemporary American poet, winner of the prestigious Kingsley-Tufts Award for Poetry. The volume opens with twenty-one new poems, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other periodicals, and in The Best American Poems 2001, edited by Robert Hass and David Lehman. Following are selections from Koethe's five earlier collections of poems: Blue Vents, Domes, The Late Wisconsin Spring, The Constructor, and Falling Water. Together these poems create a remarkable and powerful new volume, a milestone in this gifted poet's career.

North Point North: New and Selected Poems

Harper-perennial

"As a poet who is a teacher of philosophy, John Koethe knows better than most of us the uses and dissatisfactions of both disciplines, if indeed they are disciplines. In this ravishing and haunted book he comes face to face with the time when 'more than half my life is gone,' and must try to find the meaning of 'a childish/dream of love, and then the loss of love,/and all the intricate years between.' As funny and fresh as it is tragic and undeceived, Falling Water ranks with Wallace Stevens' Auroras of Autumn as one of the profoundest meditations on existence ever formulated by an American Poet." --John Ashbery 
"To describe with unpromising candor the inner life of a man adrift in the waning of the 20th century is one thing, but to do it without a shred of self-pity is another. The poems of his new book, Falling Water, are like no one else's. In them, even the most extreme exertions of consciousness are transformed into the luminous measures of beautiful speech." --Mark Strand 
"In this ambitious volume, the magnificent poet who gave us The Late Wisconsin Spring moves ever more swiftly and surefootedly into the deepest regions of self-invention: the past -- few poets write more accurately and painfully about that uncanny estranged place that never finds its way out of us; the present, or idea of the present, as mere projection, and yet a projection so poignantly, materially, tenderly touched it gleams with all its claustrophobic distances; and the future...'I wish that time could bring the future back again/And let me see things as they used to seem to me/Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state--/Alone and free and filled...' With its low-key blank verse, its apparently casual manner of speech, its digressions, asides, recollections -- with all its taking its time -- this is a poetry of magnificent undertow, all proximity of thought, singularity of contemplation, protest, pretext, reflection -- all disenchantment and then, suddenly, blazing re-enchantment, with the newly, lovingly, seen-through real." --Jorie Graham

Harpercollins

"John Koethe's The Constructor is a scrupulous, elegant account of the meditative intellect as an instrument continually registering the passage of time. Exquisitely modulated and brutally honest, these poems would be harrowing were they not so seductively beautiful. No one writing in this country today sees as deeply as Koethe into the tears that lie at the heart of things, and no contemporary investigation of the life of the mind may be called complete that does not accommodate the lush intricacy of his terrifying recognitions."-- George Bradley"I prize John Koethe's intimate expanses and unsettling reveries, his tender contemplations and odd mental landscapes. He is an heir to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and, like them, he gives us the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting, daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and held aloft."-- Edward Hirsch

Let me stay there for a while, while evening
 Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.
 There's something in the air, something I can't quite see,
 Hiding behind this stock of images, this language
 Culled from all the poems I've ever loved.
 John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death."
 Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "Eros and the Everyday." This is followed by "The Unlasting," a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "The Maquiladoras" and "Poetry and the War." This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "Proust" and "HAMLET."

In his eighth book of poems, John Koethe offers readers the reflections of a poet in midlife, an "aging child of sixty-two," passionately engaged with the world yet drawn to meditate on memory, time, and the mysteries of human existence. In Ninety-fifth Street, Koethe retraces narratives from his life and moves across various landscapes he once inhabited; in his hands these stories and places become poems of beauty, feeling, and poignant candor. Disarmingly conversational and always accessible, these new poems offer the pleasures of a lucid intelligence and a distinctive poetic voice, by turns contemplative and worldly, lyrical, witty, and elegiac.

Ninety-fifth Street: Poems

Essays & Correspondence

“[A] visionary new book of poems and prose meditations.”—Susan Stewart, author of Columbarium and Red Rover“John Koethe’s poems…are profound meditations on time and the curious hold it has on the human psyche. In them, even the most extreme exertions of consciousness are transformed into the faultless measures of clear and beautiful speech.”—American Academy of Arts and LettersROTC Kills is a lyrical and arresting new collection from renowned poet John Koethe, 2011 winner of the Arts and Letters Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize for the year’s outstanding work of poetry.  As typified by the provocative title piece—a wistful look back at the poet’s years at Harvard University in the late sixties—the poetry and prose within evoke the memories and dreams; the literature, popular culture, and philosophy of a generation through the lens of the poet’s personal history. In the grand tradition of Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery, ROTC Kills is an important work from a major American poet.

ROTC Kills: Poems

North Point North: New and Selected Poems showcases the work of an important contemporary American poet, winner of the prestigious Kingsley-Tufts Award for Poetry. 
The volume opens with twenty-one new poems, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other periodicals, and in The Best American Poems 2001, edited by Robert Hass and David Lehman. Following are selections from Koethe's five earlier collections of poems: Blue Vents, Domes, The Late Wisconsin Spring, The Constructor, and Falling Water. Together these poems create a remarkable and powerful new volume, a milestone in this gifted poet's career.

Genre Fiction

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Koethe, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Koethe, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Koethe, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Constructor: Poems

Falling Water: Poems

Sally's Hair: Poems

North Point North: New and Selected Poems

Falling Water: Poems

The Constructor: Poems

Sally's Hair: Poems

Ninety-fifth Street: Poems

ROTC Kills: Poems

North Point North: New and Selected Poems