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The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Third Edition)

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If the passive despair of Prufrock (or should we say Eliot in a Prufrock mood) could be entwined with the searing wit and rage of S. Plath, the result might resemble Weldon Kees' unforgettable best poems -- twenty of them perhaps, all included in this book. And the comparison with Plath is fair I think, not because both lives ended in suicide but because both were spectacularly inventive imagists and masters of the craft whose poems peer into the abyss. Although this collection contains some of the most harrowing English language poems of our times -- the final poem in the "Robinson" series, certainly -- flashes of black comedy ensure that this book is as pleasing as it is troubling. I for one, find the following lines from "The Crime Club" devilishly pleasing: "Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,/The torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,/...The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,/The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,/The note, 'To be killed this way is quite all right with me.'"

It would have been sad indeed if the work of Weldon Kees had disappeared into obscurity, as it was dangerously close to doing. Nothing escapes this poets' dark, razor edge sensibility;
the whole thing reads as a kind of pessimistic culture shock. Taking his cues from Joyce and Eliot's "Waste Land", he is pitiless in his assessment of the human condition and civilization.

He is not, however, tiringly depressing like Philip Larkin. He has a voice all his own and it is compelling and vivid. It is pretty obvious that his "Robinson" poems are autobiographical, at least in terms of Robinson's perceptions of the world around him. "For My Daughter" is a poem you will not soon forget.

For my part, I do not believe Weldon Kees is still alive. After reading and re-reading this collection I can't help but see that as wishful thinking. You can't fake this kind of sincerity. I would liken him to Leopardi, Beckett, and other masters of poetic darkness, but he has a voice so individual that he needs no predecessors. An absolute must read.

Kees is a master of image, and has a profound sense of time and place--his language has the direct and unselfconscious quality of a newspaper headline, and his meters are natural and terse. There is a lumious, jarring quality to his work that makes you feel like you'd found something important that's been lost for a long time. You have. This is the first collection of his work that has ever been generally available.

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees is a gem of a book, depressing but deeply moving. Kees was one of the finest poets of the 20th century.

One of the finest books finds of the year for me! Kees poems are complex and intriguing.

Kees is a brilliant modernist poet, who describes the world he sees in dark and apocalyptic tones, filled with biting satirical wit. He poems read like photographic images of the dark reality in which he lives. His style is inventive and original. The world around him is hollow and meaningless, as seen through the eyes of bathers, lovers, scholars, soldiers, politicians, businessmen, actors, and Robinson -- the caricature of the average man of the cold-war era. His vision is the opposite Whitman with a vision that's closer to Kafka and Samuel Beckett, expressing the pointlessness of war and mechanistic civilization. As he writes: "If this room is our world, then let / This world be damned. Open this roof / For one last monstrous flood / To sweep away this floor, these chairs, / This bed that takes me to no sleep. / Under the black sky of our circumstance, / Mumbling of wet barometers, I stare / At citied dust that soils the glass / While thunder perishes. The heroes perish / Miles from here. Their blood runs heavy in the grass, / Sweet, restless, clotted, sickening, / Runs to the rivers and the seas, the seas / That are the source of that devouring flood / That I await, that I must perish by." Kees is one of the best American poets and deserves a wider audience.

--Alexander Shaumyan, poet, author of "Spirit of Rebellion"

Weldon Kees has been recommended to me by more than one person. And the reason is that he is a very dark poet, and a very interesting one at that. Kees is slightly outside of academia, though his reputation is getting bigger. I found his earlier work to be better than his later work, that's not to say that there isn't good stuff in his later work, just that I preferred his early work. I'd also recommend you did up a good biography of Kees, since he also has an interesting life.