Love Had a Compass: Journals and Poetry

by Robert Lax

Overview

"Among America's greatest poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words." -Richard Kostelanetz, New York Times Book Review

Every generation of poets seems to harbor its own hidden genius, one whose stature and brilliance come to light after his talent has already been achieved and exercised. The same drama of obscurity and nuance that attended the discovery of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens is suggested by the career of Robert Lax. An expatriate American whose work to date — more than forty books — has been published mostly in Europe, this 85-year-old poet built a following in the U.S. among figures as widespread as Mark Van Doren, e. e. cummings, Jack Kerouac, and Sun Ra.

The works in Love Had a Compass represent every stage of Lax's development as a poet, from his early years in the 1940s as a staff writer for The New Yorker to his present life on the Greek Island of Patmos. An inveterate wanderer, Lax's own sense of himself as both exile and pilgrim is carefully evoked in his prose journals and informs the pages of the Marseille Diaries, published here for the first time. Together with the poems, they provide the best portrait available to date of one of the most striking and original poets of our age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802128843
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/19/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

ROBERT LAX was born in Olean, New York, in 1915. He studied at Columbia Universityin the 1930s, where John Berryman, Ad Reinhardt, and Thomas Merton were among his contemporaries, and later worked for the New Yorker and Time before helping to found Jubilee magazine in 1953. After traveling for extended periods in Italy and France in the 1950s, he settled in Greece in 1962, first on the island of Kalymnos, then later on the island of Patmos. He died in 2000.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Occasional Poems 1

Zoo Sign 3

Jerusalem 4

Andalusian Proverb 6

In me is the watcher 7

Every night in the world 8

The port was longing 9

Forms 10

Mosquito 11

Three Concrete Poems 13

Twenty-Five Episodes 19

Fables 33

The Man with the Big General Notions 35

Alley Violinist 38

An Angel 39

Problem in Design 40

The Short Man 42

Old Magician 44

Therapist 47

Old Fable 48

The Circus of the Sun 49

One Island 97

Port City: The Marseille Diaries 119

A Greek Journal 195

Editorial Reviews

Among America’s greatest poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words.” —Richard Kostelanetz, New York Times Book Review

“Lax's early poems are a mix of emotionality...and formal experimentation...But his finest work can be seen in the previously unpublished sequence of poems, Port City: The Marseille Diaries.” —Publishers Weekly

“Lax dispenses with metaphor and largely with ego . . . to present what he sees with elemental forcefulness, as if in strong Mediterranean sunlight . . . individual poems register as prayers and, more often, mystical visions.” —Booklist

From the Publisher