The Constructor

By John Koethe

Book Overview

"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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060956356
• ISBN13: 9780060956356
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: PerfectBound
• Length: 108 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

You must read this book.

These ambitious meditative poems are a beautiful and shattering achievement. Wordsworth, Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are all internalized in this demanding record of one's man's inner life. THE CONSTRUCTOR should be read by any serious reader of poetry.