Sarments: New and Selected Poems

"This collection is an essential delight; a 'book resonant of a life / neither following nor in pursuit', gathering old and new work all equally fresh. As the epigraph to the first poem attests, 'one does not work out of a reaction against but rather out of affection for something.' Like Mayakovsky, John James has produced a body of work perfectly able to marry lyricism and coarseness, rage and tenderness - and, like the Futurist, to weld the aesthetic to the social. Here is that rarest poe...