This collection of poetry showcases the unique talent of James Schuyler and highlights the writing that won him a Pulitzer Prize. "Schuyler's subject is his life, and his poems often read like elegant journal entries." - Publishers Weekly Born in Chicago in 1923, the late James Schuyler gravitated early on to Manhattan, where he came to be associated with such stalwarts of the New York School as Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Yet his work--unlike, say, Ashbery's, with whom he wrote a novel, A Nest of Ninnies --is eminently accessible. Indeed, Schuyler's Collected Poems functions as an exquisite illustration of how to write poetry with a crystal-clear surface. And he always remains a master of the light touch, even when he himself is in desperate straits. In Schuyler's long pieces, such as "Hymn to Life," "The Morning of the Poem," and "A Few Days," he casually reverses the romantic position: anti-didactic, anti-epiphanic, he trusts his imagination and resists any psychological theorizing about why one memory, one perception, is connected to another. He mistrusts monumentality. Wisdom, he knows, is enervating: "Things should get better as you / grow older, but that / is not the way. The way is inscrutable and hard to / handle." But long or short, Collected Poems is a record of discoveries, and each one is marked by Schuyler's terrific antennae and gift of tonal rightness. (The same qualities are on ample, if more casual, display in the poet's diary .) There's no question that he is among the most formidable and most observant poets of postwar America. Indeed, his attractively quotidian elegy for W.H. Auden is a far more subtle poem than the endlessly quoted tour de force that Auden dedicated to W.B. Yeats: I don't have to burn his letters as he asked his friends to do: they were lost a long time ago. So much to remember, so little to say: that he liked martinis and was greedy about the wine? I always thought he would live to a great age. He did not. Wystan, kind man and great poet, goodbye. Nobody thought that James Schuyler would live to a great age. But the death of this "kind man and great poet" in 1991 felt no less cruelly premature. --Mark Rudman Sestina [al Poco Giorno] 3/23/66 8/12/70 Advent Adverts: 1. Ambrosia Adverts: 2. Good-bye, Cheap Lamps Adverts: 3. Swan And Edgar Good Linen After Joe Was At The Island Afterward Afterward Ajaccio Violets Alice Faye At Ruby Foo's An Almanac Amy Lowell Thoughts Andrew Lord Poems April And Its Forsythia At Darragh's I At The Beach August First, 1974 August Night Autumn Leaves Await Awoke Beaded Balustrade Beautiful Funerals A Belated Birthday Poem Below The Stairs Birds Bleeding Gums Blossoming Oakwood Blue A Blue Towel The Bluet Boer War Bread Strike Buildings Buried At Springs Buttered Greens A Cardinal The Cenotaph: 1. Moneses Uniflora The Cenotaph: 2. We See Seals. Boats Go By A Chapel Closed Gentian Distances Cornflowers Crocus Night The Crystal Lithium The Day The Day Daylight Dear Joe Dec. 28, 1974 December Deep Winter Dining Out With Doug And Frank (for Frank Polach) The Dog Wants His Dinner Dora'bella's Naples Watercolor Dreams Earth's Holocaust An East Window On Elizabeth Street The Edge In The Morning 'the Elizabethans Called It Dying' Empathy And New Year En Route To Southampton Evening Evening Wind Evenings In Vermont Eyes Eyes At The Window Faberge The Faure Ballade Faure's Second Piano Quartet February A Few Days Flashes For Bob Dash Four Poems Freely Espousing Frock From The Next Going Good Morning Grand Duo A Grave Gray Day Gray, Intermittently Blue, Eyed Hero The Green Door Greenwich Avenue Greetings From The Chateau Growing Dark Gulls Hats Haze A Head A Held Breath Horse-chestnut Trees And Roses Hudson Ferry Hymn To Life I Sit Down To Type I Think Ilford Rose Book In A Churchyard In Earliest Morning In January In The Round In White City In Wiry Winter Industrial Archaeology Janis Joplin's Dead: Long Live Pearl Jelly Jelly Joint June 30, 1974 Just Before Fall Korean Mums Labor Day Let's All Hear It For Mildred Bailey Letter Poem #2 Letter Poem #3 Letter To A Friend: Who Is Nancy Daum? Light Blue Above Light From Canada The Light Within Like Lorraine Ellison Lilacs Looking Forward To See Jane Real Soon A Man In Blue March Here Mark The Master Of The Golden Glow May 24th Or So May, 1972 Mike Milk Money Musk Mood Indigo Moon The Morning The Morning Of The Poem A Name Day A New Yorker The Night Noon Office November Now And Then O Sleepless Night October October 5, 1981 On The Dresser Oriane Over The Hills Overcast, Hot The Payne Whitney Poems: Arches The Payne Whitney Poems: Back The Payne Whitney Poems: Blizzard The Payne Whitney Poems: February 13, 1975 The Payne Whitney Poems: Heather And Calendulas The Payne Whitney Poems: Linen The Payne Whitney Poems