North Point North

by John Koethe

North Point North: New and Selected Poems showcases the work of an important contemporary American poet, winner of the prestigious Kingsley-Tufts Award for Poetry.

The volume opens with twenty-one new poems, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other periodicals, and in The Best American Poems 2001, edited by Robert Hass and David Lehman. Following are selections from Koethe's five earlier collections of poems: Blue Vents, Domes, The Late Wisconsin Spring, The Constructor, and Falling Water. Together these poems create a remarkable and powerful new volume, a milestone in this gifted poet's career.

Genres: Poetry

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

John Koethe is an American poet, essayist and professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Koethe is originally from San Diego, California. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University.Koethe's published work includes Blue Vents (Audit/Poetry, 1969), Domes (Columbia University Press, 1973), The Late Wisconsin Spring (Princeton University Press, 1984), The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (Cornell University Press, 1996), Falling Water (HarperPerennial, 1997), The Constructor, (HarperFlamingo, 1999), Poetry at One Remove (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2002). His most recent books include Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 2005), Sally's Hair (HarperCollins, 2006), Ninety-fifth Street (Harper Parennial, 2009) and ROTC Kills (Harper Perennial, 2012).

Koethe has also contributed poetry and essays to publications including Poetry, Paris Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Parnassus, and Art News.His work has been included in anthologies of poetry, including The Best American Poetry (2003).Additionally, he was selected to contribute his views on contemporary poetry for the book Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, which billed him as one of "85 leading contemporary poets."

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the saddest moments
Are the ones that also seem most beautiful,
For the nature of a moment is to fade,
Leaving everything unaltered, and the landscape

Where the light fell as it was before.
And time makes poetry from what it takes away,
And the measure of experience
Is not that it be real, but that it last,

And what one knows is simply what one knew,
And what I want is simply what I had.
*

I remember the enchantment and the peaceful light
That used to settle on the yard on summer evenings.
Couldn’t some of that return? My world feels broken,
And the world that you describe is one that I can’t see,
In which there isn’t any happiness, and where the sky became
Opaque and lost its tenderness, and what had seemed like
Poetry became two separate monologues, imprisoning each of us in
a name.
*

It
Troubles me that time should make things sweeter, that
Instead of learning to perceive things as they are I’ve
Learned to lose them, or to see them as they disappear
Into the insubstantial future. Everything here is mine,
Or lies within my power to accept. I want to find a way
To live inside each moment as it comes, then let it go
Before it breaks up in regret or disillusionment.
*

Is this how one survives? In
Someone else’s memory?

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Koethe is another of those deeply meditative poets. North Point North is my introduction to him. I like what I've read. His work is similar to that of Charles Wright and T. S. Eliot in that some of it forms a dense meditative fog. If we don't quite get it, if the poet's indirection skips off the mind, we continue confident there's a vein worth mining. Generally, we don't let ourselves love what we don't understand. Koethe's poetry, like that of other poets, displays a langauge so rich and suggestive that the reader doesn't necessarily have to get every nuance of the idea to realize some resonance from it. There's plenty to think about. Later a particular poem may benefit from reflection or may mean something entirely different. First we have to let our attraction to the work ripen. The heart responds quicker than we can articulate the response, how we feel. But when the heart responds we have to return over and over again to the gift we're given, even if we never find the words to express why the gift is a gift. North Point North begins with new poems before selecting from 5 previous volumes. His subjects are family and memory, history, nature and the seasons, among other things. And a couple of love poems I like a lot. The concluding poem is "Falling Water," a poem about Frank Lloyd Wright and Koethe's response to him at various stages of his life. It ends with a thought about inventing things again. In an earlier poem he'd said, "A writer's secret is an uncorrupted world." I think that's one thing he does well. His purity of language allows us to find a purity in experience, kinda like inventing everything again, as he wrote in "Falling Water." And he shows us that books like this become constant companions. We need them.

[Bethany · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite collections of poetry. Koethe writes about life with a sense of nostalgia that is honest, beautiful and melancholy.

[* · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dream of love, and then the loss of love,
And all the intricate years between." <3

[Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tarde años en terminar este libro, todavía no comprendo la razón, solo sé que he llorado mucho