Collected Poems (Paperback)

~ Ed Cox (Author) "I've no idea, sense of place, where you might be when you stare out across this crowded bar..." (more)
Key Phrases: Union Station, West Virginia

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Where does a poem come from?... Ed Cox spent most of his life stopping, looking, and listening..." -- William R. MacKaye

“...His poems are among the most humane -- American in their generosity of spirit; universal in their wisdom.” -- Jeffery Beam, Poet and Poetry Editor of Oyster Boy Review

“...These poems, collected now nine years after his death, evidence a remarkable, lasting achievement..." -- Richard McCann

About the Author

Ed Cox (1946-1992) was a native Washingtonian who spent all but four of his 46 years here in the area. A vibrant part of the local literary scene, he was also an important member of Washington’s gay community, and his poems, so strongly influenced by gay liberation, are also classics of gay literature. Ed Cox was many things: Irish, a Navy veteran, a political activist, and a teacher who led classes at senior centers, homes for battered women, and other unorthodox places. He edited two books of his students’ writing: “Seeds and Leaves” (1977) and “Some Lives” (1984).

Ed’s poems appeared in Calvert Review, December, Diana’s Bi-Monthly, Fag Rag, Gargoyle, Gay People’s News, Gay Sunshine, Hanging Loose, Interchange, Mass Transit, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pellet, Phoebe, Salt Lick, Sewanee Review, Takoma, the Washington Post, Washington Review, Washout Quarterly, and Writer’s Digest, and in the anthologies: Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology; None of the Above, and Orgasms of Light: The Gay Sunshine Anthology.

In 1989 Ed was awarded the Lyndhurst Prize, a sustaining grant that supported his work through 1991. His early death in 1992 before publication of his magnum opus, “Part of,” was tragedy on a grand scale. This volume reprints Ed’s two published books, “Blocks” (1972) and “Waking,” (1977) includes “These Two” a long poem about his parents, and finally puts the unpublished manuscript he spent so many years assembling into print

Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Paycock Press; 1st edition (August 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0931181100
• ISBN-13: 978-0931181108
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,378,954 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a spare and wistful beauty, March 6, 2005

By	Reginald Shepherd (Pensacola, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I first encountered Ed Cox's poems in the early 1980s, when I read his book Waking, which Gay Sunshine Press published in 1977. His spare, wistful evocations of adolescent gay longing and anticipation, and of the desire for touch and connection that drives men to cruise streets and bars looking, waiting, hoping for the one who will "hear the words we find in our hands," are still as powerful as ever. Some of the earlier poems in this collection are almost haiku, stripped to their most essential elements, elemental words: "this wind these windows." The delicate, precise poems retain their poise even when addressing homelessness, mental illness, Hiroshima, and Vietnam; and his homage to Hart Crane manages both grandeur and intimacy. The long poem "Ezra and Agnes," about his parents, vividly conjures up their world, their history, and their voices: "You can go, go/like a match on a cold night." The fragility of many of the poems underscores the fragility of the moments they memorialize.

Unfortunately, the linguistic energy and surprise, the sense of hearing and seeing each word for the first time, flag a bit in the last, previous unpublished section, "Part Of," though there are still amazing phrases like "this is the fossil of thirst" or "and our memories complete the shore." The revisions of earlier poems, in normalizing and smoothing out the syntax and diction, sometimes lose the charge of the originals. But the attention to and love for the things and people of the quotidian world, the overlooked and forgotten out of which the real is made, is always strong and compelling: "Immediacy [is] our primary objective." The poems never lose their conviction of "how things have names, a meaning of their own." Ed Cox may be dead, but his poems still help us in "drawing from the dark one more day."