The Constructor - by John Koethe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"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

Review Quotes

"'This secret life/Whose language is the melancholy sound the heart makes/Beating against its cage': this is John Koethe's subject in his beautifully constructed and deeply moving new book of poems--lyrics of the dark and painfully honest inward gaze. Koethe, a philosopher by training, knows that meditation is more than just random reflection, that it is a discipline exercise culminating in a hard-won and hence exhilarating self-knowledge."--Marjorie Perloff"Starting from Stevens ("Sunday Evening!") and ending. . . never ending, Koethe's voice is raised in an indefatigably eloquent phraseology of inspection (the nostalgias, the anticipations, the fatigues), rhyming rarely but characteristically 'forgetfulness' with 'fullness, ' and this time around epitomizing the effort in a single line: 'I have this life, and still remain dissatified.' Pause at 'still' at 'remain, ' at 'dissatisfied' and give the three sentences equal weight: you have the core; now read outward to the rind. That which is creative must create itself--the poet, the maker, indeed with certain happiness "The Constructor!""-- Richard Howard"He is a master of blank verse who knows the field of his inquiry remarkably well and has give it, with this volume, a new and almost sublime magnitude."--"Rain Taxi