Straits

Kenneth Koch continues to expand the range of what is possible to do in poetry. His title poem is a stirring collection of disconnected and connected sentences on such themes as love, politics, and the exploration of sub-polar seas. "Vous etes plus beaux que vous ne pensiez" is a series of bright, rapid sketches of the lives of ten artists and writers. Writing in a variant of the style of the eighteenth-century poet James Thomson, Koch revives an old genre--praise of the seasons--with his own characteristic mixture of clarity and sensuous excitement. A group of twenty-five poems called "Songs from the Plays" creates a new genre: songs written for plays that don't exist but from which plays might be imagined or constructed. "My Olivetti Speaks" is perhaps Koch's clearest and wittiest meditation on the nature of poetry itself. The themes of time and change in individual lives are given an unusual look in "Study of Time" and the Villon-like "Ballade."