Look at the clouds.
They may be what I look at most of all
Without seeing anything.
It may be that many other things are the same way
But with clouds it's obvious.

The motorboat runs through the sky reflected in the river.
Look at the long trail of clouds behind.

'A New Guide: 13'

Intensely serious beneath the bright surface, Kenneth Koch's poems 'maintain power', Denis Donoghue wrote, 'by rarely choosing to exert it'. Koch is a virtuoso, 'a masterly innovator'who has used his extravagant powers of wit and invention to enlarge the sphere of the poetic' (David Lehman). He has written plays, a novel and short stories, and he has collaborated with other writers and with painters. He had an insatiable hunger for new forms, new directions, new kinds of writing -- in this volume, for example, the theme and variations of 'One Train May Hide Another', and the 'poems by ships at sea', the post-Apollinaire couplets of 'A Time Zone', the orientalising quatrains of 'The First Step', and the hundred or so little poems that constitute the big poem 'On Aesthetics'. 'A reliable lover,' said Paul Hoover, 'Koch never sets out to break your heart. It just happens.'

For One Train and his American Selected Poems he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1995.

'Kenneth Koch, a unique poet, has continued to explain his "own idea of what made sense", writing poems for forty years, without ceasing to be human and funny, without ever forgetting what poetry is. He is above all a love poet, therefore a serious one.' Frank Kermode