Rating: - Beatnik Bible
The best collection of poetry written after World War II that I am aware of, "Lunch Poems" brings together the high culture and low culture. O'Hara was known for hanging out with the '50s elite of celebrity and progresive painters, musicians, and actors. Yet he also had an affinity for walking the streets of New York alone at lunchtime or evening, befriending vagrants, observing day to day work and the diversity of metropolitan life. His poems are witty, profound, insightful, original, inspiring, and always unsettling the reader with his unusual observations about life. O'Hara is incredibly literate and knows his poetic heritage, but through "Lunch Poems" he remains intenseley aware of his present and the importance of what goes on around him. Between musings on Charles Baudelaire, Billie Holiday, Arthur Rimbaud, and Miles Davis, one gets the sense of a rootless, absorbing man in love with New York City, art, poetry, daily life, and transcendent experience.