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Selected Poems

Frank O'Hara

Edited by Donald Allen

Cover Picture of Selected Poems
10% off
Categories: 20th Century, American, Bestsellers, Humour, LGBTQ+
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (180 pages)
(Pub. Jan 2005)
9781857547719
£12.95 £11.65
  • Description
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  • Now that our hero has come back to us
    In his white pants and we know his nose
    Trembling like a flag under fire,
    We see the calm cold river is supporting
    Our forces, the beautiful history.

    from 'On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing
     the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art'

    Frank O'Hara (1926-66) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate ('any time, any place'). This is not the whole O'Hara: he may have scribbled poems on serviettes, but others he worked on with intense concentration, creating sequences that are inexhaustibly nuanced, full of surprise, heartbreak and laughter. There are analogies between his work and that of the painters he championed, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning among them.

    He is resolutely metropolitan, and his metropolis is New York City. He brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, quandaries and exhilarations, of its mid-twentieth-century life.


    Frank O'Hara
    Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926, and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He served in the US navy (1944-46) in the South Pacific, and attended the universities of Harvard and Michigan. In 1951 O’Hara settled in Manhattan, and soon became a central figure in a number of the ... read more
    Donald Allen
     Donald Merriam Allen was a writer, editor, publisher and translator of contemporary American literature. He is best known for his project The New American Poetry 1945-1960, just one of the anthologies of contemporary American writing he released. ... read more
    'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.' Mark Ford Praise for Frank O'Hara '... a remarkable new poetry - both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it - not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space.'
    John Ashbery
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