Description
Book SynopsisJohn Godfrey's masterful body of work has sustained its attentive, lovesick, unruly energy for over fifty years. The City Keeps brings together the best poems from his thirteen collections, plus some previously uncollected. "Dedicated to those who people the City of New York," Godfrey's work is populated, elusive, and geometric, but also full of tenderness and light. With an enemy like daylight who needs the psychology dime Hips do the work and I cross the world John Godfrey was born in Massena, N.Y. in 1945. He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1967, and took a B.S. in Nursing from Columbia University in 1994. He has received fellowships from the General Electric Foundation (1984), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2009), and the Z Foundation (2013). He retired in 2011 after 17 years as a nurse clinician in HIV/AIDS. He has lived in the East Village of Manhattan since the 1960s.
Trade ReviewGodfrey remains open to the minute particularities and imaginative wanderings of everyday life--the multitude of wayward thoughts, musings and associations, the erogenous zone of thinking and looking. --John Yau, Hyperallergic His syntax, at once lightning fast and completely casual (like Patriots receiver Randy Moss), runs slant patterns across convention. He incorporates vernacular, he blows fuses on cliches, and he scalpels away bookkeeping words (as Pound called them) to jump-cut high energy, emotive phrasings. --Forrest Gander, Harriet (The Poetry Foundation) For my money, there's no one writing better. I give away most of my books, but I won't give this away. --Alex Katz, in an interview by Amy Summerland, Boston Globe Godfrey hands us great gifts of richly unpredictable language, "the power and felicity of pronouns," an ever alert eye and ear, and a particular human life: these are made manifest and shared with elegance, integrity, and a seriousness always kept from descending to the obvious or solemn by the poet's tough and compassionate humor. --Anselm Hollo His genius rings true. --Peter Gizzi The combination of his gorgeous sentimentality and irresistible philosophical hauteur is like a cross between Latin music and Schopenhauer--simultaneously drawing us closer and further away--with a strong American conversational tone holding it together. --Ron Padgett
Table of Contentsfrom 26 Poems (Adventures in Poetry, 1971) Touch Sonnet Poem Sonnet Rain Waste First Taste Month The Works Little Sister Our Knees Poem from 3 Poems (Bouwerie Editions, 1973) Love Knife Radiant Dog Gray Blazing Pit from Music of the Curbs (Adventures in Poetry, 1976) Equinox Atlas The Music of the Curbs Morning Star Come April Idiots Love Peon La Gloire Saint Augustine Peaches from Dabble (Full Court Press, 1982) Schnapps Sonata Dabble Mirrors at Night Poem By Antique Vogues Unholy Spring Double Sonnet Venus Passive Aspic Our Lady For You Wings Eight-Aught De Sica? Astral Roulette from Where the Weather Suits My Clothes (Z Press, 1984) Yankee Green Alto Corpus Oration The Eastern Desert My Mother, Life Bridge of Sand Reveille Look, You Lachrymal Humidities So Let’s Look at It Another Way Where the Weather Suits My Clothes from Midnight on Your Left (The Figures, 1988) Patria In Front of a Large Number of People Fur I Don’t Believe in Miracles Late Show Midnight On Your Left Family Jewels Savory Arrivals Peon #117 Johnny Nash, Meet Johnny “G” Bloody Dewlaps Jaywalk Endlessly Pact In the Chamber The City Keeps from Push the Mule (The Figures, 2001) The Ticket The Dream You Threw At the Level of Heart Waited For Manger Lined with Fur Kinds of Smoke In Her Own Hand Grasp Is Provide The James Brother Pouring Gulf To Keep Saliva Warm Unless You Tarry from Private Lemonade (Adventures in Poetry, 2003) Everything Beautiful Shadow Feet Disbelief Private Lemonade That Place Anymore Rockin’ Bleach Anywhere Downy Skin The Beautiful One Front Seat Knowhow Pool Cake It Can’t Say Protection Dim, Dud Dream Marble Flakes Food of Others Parade Slope Whole Heavy Building Overlooked Nomads Wavy from City of Corners (Wave Books, 2008) Waiting There Comes with Galore All the Hair Starling Convenience Beat It Silhouette Straining to Hear Floss at the Barbecue Loops Nearly Perfect Newcomers The One Who Turns Any Country on Earth Realm Remedy Get Help The Signs One Percent from Singles and Fives (Fewer & Further Press, 2011) Your Island Where Else Token Faux Getting Tough Can You Tell Tell the Angels At Second Glance from Tiny Gold Dress (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2012) Tiny Gold Dress Black Lapel Dispelling Face Despite Murder To You For By The Urge On Turbulence Lip Read So Real Rain, Boy Many Duets Correct the Air Betrays Nothing Who’s Left from Gold Stars Wet Hearts (Faux Press, 2014) In Form of Seashell Doubles Headlight Tag The Title Gold Stars Wet Hearts Got a Million Assemble the Colors A Hundred Feet from Knee-length Black (Free Poetry: Boise State University, 2015) After Quiddity Red Tide Which Next Minute Box Set Knee-length Black Umbrella and Eyes Uncollected Poems Trip Wire One Hand Evidence Fa-fa-fa Load of Ice Missing Planet
