John Koethe unravels timeless questions of death, math, meaning, and much more in this mesmerizing collection.John Koethe, one of our most philosophically sophisticated poets, has written a book of pithy, contentious, witty poems about our perennial, never-satisfied search for meaning.The silent mysteries of the stars and the mute beauty of human graves have deep similarities that Koethe probes in these poems with a wondering, wandering gimlet eye that will...

North Point North: New and Selected Poems showcases the work of an important contemporary American poet, winner of the prestigious Kingsley-Tufts Award for Poetry.The volume opens with twenty-one new poems, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other periodicals, and in The Best American Poems 2001, edited by Robert Hass and David Lehman. Following are selections from Koethe's five ear...

Let me stay there for a while, while eveningGathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.There's something in the air, something I can't quite see,Hiding behind this stock of images, this languageCulled from all the poems I've ever loved.John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human...

"As a poet who is a teacher of philosophy, John Koethe knows better than most of us the uses and dissatisfactions of both disciplines, if indeed they are disciplines. In this ravishing and haunted book he comes face to face with the time when 'more than half my life is gone,' and must try to find the meaning of 'a childish/dream of love, and then the loss of love,/and all the intricate years between.' As funny and fresh as it is tragic and undeceived, Falling Water ranks with Wallace Steve...

A searching new collection from America's philosopher-poetJohn Koethe, in his tenth volume of poetry, investigates the capricious nature of everyday life, "the late-night jazz, great sex and all / The human shit defining what we are." His poems—always dynamic and in process, never static or complete—luxuriate in the questions that punctuate the most humdrum of routines, rendering a robust portrait of an individual: complicated, quotidian, and resounding with truth. ...

Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe's thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them.The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery alongside philo...

A rich, meditative new collection of poetry from John Koethe, the "necessary and great poet" ( Hyperallergic).It's presumptuous, but if you're reading this youProbably know my usual obsessions and preoccupations:The "world"—both the word and what it stands for—and time,Which is or isn't real, depending on my mood. I've alwaysHated poems about philosophy, and I hope I still do,But since I don't know what that means anymore,...

Collected poems from America's searching and thoughtful philosopher-poet. . . There ' s somethingComforting about rituals renewed, even adolescents ' pipe dreams:They ' ll find out soon enough, and meanwhile find their placesIn the eternal scenery, less auguries or cautionary talesThan parts of an unchanging whole, as ripe for contemplationAs a planisphere or the clouds: th...

A fresh reflection on what makes life meaningfulMost people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the world. Rather, we act out of love for objects that we righ...

"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 ...

A Harper Perennial paperback original, Ninety-fifth Street is a beautiful new collection of poems by John Koethe, acclaimed by poet Edward Hirsch as an heir to Wallace Stevens. In this, his eighth book of poems, Koethe, the author of North Point North and Falling Water, offers readers the reflections of a poet in mid-life, an “aging child of 62,” passionately engaged with the world yet drawn to meditate on memory, time, and the mysteries of human existence.

Collected poems from America’s searching and thoughtful philosopher-poet....There*’s somethingComforting about rituals renewed, even adolescents’* pipe dreams:They*’**ll find out soon enough, and meanwhile find their placesIn the eternal scenery, less auguries or cautionary talesThan parts of an unchanging whole, as ripe for contemplationAs a planisphere or the clouds: the vexed destinies, the s...