A Purchase in the White Botanica

Piero Heliczer. Granary Books, $15.95 (120pp) ISBN 978-1-887123-57-0

An avant-garde '60s filmmaker in the same orbit as Andy Warhol and Jack Smith, Piero Heliczer (1937-1993) has been rediscovered by film enthusiasts and now poets. A Purchase in the White Botanica: The Collected Poetry of Piero Heliczer spotlights his other, lesser-known artistic endeavor, via the editorship of his friends and fellow poets Gerard Malanga and Anselm Hollo. This anthology of Heliczer's dreamlike, New York School-inspired verse (""much like the zinc patter and flat perspective of paris in the lukecool light the nude tree man is wormed he loves that scrawl of plumbing the small perfectly shaped girl walking slowly"") collects his previously published books and early undergraduate work, and includes a biographical interview with Heliczer's sister. (Mar.)

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