Very Collected Poems

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Over sixty years of poems celebrating one of the most dynamic careers in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry.

Gathering a lifetime of poetry, Ron Padgett's Very Collected Poems is the ultimate record of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist's oeuvre-newly updated and completed since the sold-out first edition hit shelves in 2013. Padgett's poems reverberate with his reading and friendships, from Andrew Marvell to Woody Guthrie and Kenneth Koch, alongside his musings on art and family. Wry, insightful, and direct, they offer readers the rewards of his endless curiosity and generous spirit.

Reviews

Praise for Ron Padgett

Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder. Robert Creeley

For decades now, Ron Padgett has built up a body of work that, like the tenderly deadpan ballads of Jonathan Richman, has at its heart a sort of wry, pickled innocence. . . . The charm of his linesand their power, because his work has a way of disarming you and pulling you in again and againoften comes from his allergy to anything pretentious or even poetic. He makes plain niceness look like the most radical stance of all. Jeff Gordiner, The New York Times

Padgetts plainspoken, wry poems deliver their wisdom through a kind of connoisseurship of absurdity. The New Yorker

Deeply pleasing to read. The Paris Review

Padgetts poems are so playful, self-mocking and eager to please that it would be easy to overlook their craft, not to mention the depth and sincerity of the emotions they convey. What animates [his work] is the tension between the buoyancy of its language and the gravity of its subject. The Washington Post

Padgetts sense of romantic joy is undiminished, as is his thoughtfulness about language and the ways in which time changes meaning, and sense can morph into eloquent absurdity. Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

Wonderful, generous, funny poetry. John Ashbery

Author Bio

Ron Padgett's How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has also received the Shelley Memorial Award and the Frost medal from the PSA. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars's Complete Poems. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch's film Paterson. New York City has been his home base since 1960.