A Possible World

Koch passed away this summer at 77 after a battle with leukemia, having recently produced some of the strongest work of his career: 2000's New Addresses (an NBA finalist). These two volumes-one of new work and one of poems that preceded his 1960 debut Ko, or A Season on Earth-show Koch at his various best. Sun Out catches Koch assembling the dictions (and plentiful exclamation points) he would later synthesize into his distinctive hall of linguistic mirrors, yet these '50s poems, like those of Koch's New York School brethren Ashbery and O'Hara, speak remarkably directly to our own ""circumstances the Afghanistan flowers/ The feet under the hue of/ The mid-Atlantic."" The long poem ""When the Sun Tries to Go On"" looks back to Stevens's ""The Comedian as the Letter C,"" and forward to O'Hara's ""Second Avenue."" A Possible World's one-act verse plays, one-line poems, autobiographical reminiscences and long, mock-Byronic narratives display Koch's verve and light touch, but are unmistakably colored by requiem. The opening ""Bel Canto"" gives thanks ""For love itself, and friendship its co-agent"" in the ottava rima of Koch's long poem Ko, while ""Variations on Home and Abroad"" returns to Ko's thoughts about national origins. ""To Buddhism"" harks back to last year's New Addresses, and introduces the short poems about European and Asian travel that comprise much of the book. Those poems combine autobiographical nostalgia with a trademark whimsy: ""The Acropolis has a uniform/ That no schoolboy can wear because it is invisible./ `It goes to the Periclean School!' "" The title poem's typographical festival pays Mallarm an homage to ""Mondo universal collectivity/ Mondo aggrandizement/ Mondo nothing left to teach,"" while the concluding ""A Memoir,"" finds, wryly, ""Someone is singing/ On the landing below/ The arc strike of a pen on paper/ Doesn't put one in the show."" Koch, as these two books amply demonstrate, most definitely remains in our collective performance. (Oct. 19)