“Though I am known today mostly as an essayist, occasionally as a fiction writer, for about fifteen years I wrote poetry. I published poems in countless little magazines, gave readings all over, earned a living of sorts as a poet in the schools, teaching the art to children, and put out two collections: the first in 1972, the second in 1976. When I look back at those years during which poetry formed such an important part of my identity, I am tempted to rub my eyes, as though recalling a time when I ran off and joined the circus; yet at the time it seemed a logical enough pursuit. ”—from “The Poetry Years” Introductory Essay.
“Phillip Lopate may be an American ambassador of nonfiction, but he is also a youthful, taciturn, love-seeking New York poet, whose poems—plainspoken, personal, darkly humorous— quietly gather strength while confronting the beautiful and ugly in city life. I admire their vitality and honesty.”—Henri Cole
“Phillip Lopate goes on his nerve in these jaunty, energetic, intimate, daily, and urgent New York anti-poems that come bursting out of the past with a bright immediacy. They also unnervingly prefigure his major life’s work in prose. At the End of the Day is not so much the end as the boisterous beginning of it all!”—Edward Hirsch
“In poetry or prose (and sometimes with a skeptical grin at the distinction) Phillip Lopate’s genius is for candor: feeling and observation as themselves, always unique, delivered from inside and presented without cosmetic colors or corny mood-music. His artful sharpness of mind and gaze is like no one else’s.”—Robert Pinsky
“These are extraordinary, idiosyncratic poems. As a young poet, Phillip Lopate was already writing of the personal in a way that we came to admire in his later essays, combining a merciless intelligence and open heart in a voice at once humorous, lacerating, and almost reluctantly profound. There are some pitch-perfect poems in here, such as “Hearts” and “Clearing a Space,” that I will return to again and again.”—April Bernard
“Plain, quick stories, an undercutting New York wit — the pleasures of Lopate’s poems are urban and urbane. He takes notice, he reports, he has a heart. And more: he stirs in us literature’s ungovernable alchemic hope, as his truth-saying transforms his anecdotes, and precipitates poems.”—Marie Ponsot
“Phillip Lopate is a guerilla fighter: his poems take on the Sisyphean task of trying to convince humanity to forgive itself for being flawed. He knows that this is the work to be done because he finds so much resistance to the idea in himself. The result is often startlingly wise, terrifically winning, a precious book.”—Frank Bidart
“Phillip Lopate's poems enact on a scale different from his celebrated prose, and with an irenic music, what his art, to his credit and our immense benefit, has always enacted—the discovery of the astonishing in the everyday and of the lyric moment, dense and indestructible, at the center of our
transactions, fugitive or otherwise, with the world.”—Vijay Seshadri
ISBN-13: 978-0-9785555-8-0 $16.95
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