The Past, the Future, the Present: Poems Selected and New

Frequently touched by whimsy, sometimes plainly humorous, always serious in their constant concern for the commonplace, Reed Whittemore's poems retain a remarkable freshness in this retrospective of his best work from 1946 to the present. What is perhaps most distinctive about Whittemore's voice is how deceptively ordinary it is. Here is someone who thinks and talks astonishingly like everybody else in poems that could have been written by nobody else.