Selected Poems

A bold editor at literary presses Cape Editions and Cape Goliard, publishers of Charles Olson, J.H. Prynne and Ted Berrigan, among others, Nathaniel Tarn here provides samples from 19 of his 25 collections in Selected Poems 1950-2000. The book begins with 1964's ""Old Savage/Young City,"" a jazzy meeting of myth and modernity borrowing from the great voices of the first half of the 20th century, where the speaker envisions the dead sailing to the underworld on ocean liners, ""helpless without their desks/ and phones and sexy secretaries.""