Books by John Koethe

From award-winning poet John Koethe, a rich and resonant new collection that moves easily between autobiographical anecdote and philosophical reflection.

Let me stay there for a while, while evening Gathers 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 language Culled 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 beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "e;slow approach to anonymity and death."e; Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "e;Eros and the Everyday."e; This is followed by "e;The Unlasting,"e; a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "e;The Maquiladoras"e; and "e;Poetry and the War."e; This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "e;Proust"e; and "e;HAMLET."e;

"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

Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical work is informed throughout by a particular broad theme: that the semantic and mentalistic attributes of language and human life are shown by verbal and nonverbal conduct, but that they resist incorporation into the...

"The problem of philosophical scepticism is not so much what to say about the view itself (there being a consensus that it should be rejected), but rather what to say about the arguments that purport to yield it. And since these arguments involve...