THE HISTORY OF THE INVITATION: New and Selected Poems 1963–2000

Often overlooked or dismissed by would-be New York School categorizers—"Time without place is my usual location"—Towle has in fact been a singular voice among American poets since the early 1960s, when Frank O'Hara first championed his work. This sizeable four-sectioned selected should go a long way towards firmly establishing Towle as a master satirist/grumpy wit, an "ironic fist in a velvet glove," as Paul Violi aptly puts it in one of four accompanying essays on Towle's work. Towle's poems often drape a variably elegant and brooding diction over the gears of a razor sharp, at times surprisingly romantic intellect: "Indeed, your position can be revealed to the howling mob/ of rugged individualists/ who become enraged en masse/ like a blind spot in the electricity/ that shows you at a glance the night as it has always been." The book is arranged chronologically, with several mesmerizing long poems scattered among a variety of elegies, wry studies in artifice, historically based satires and intimate dream-based works: "How do I think about endings—/ four cups of coffee and/ falling into an abrupt dream;/ the temperature is falling,/ the hand is a motor,/ the effect of light on shapes." Towle uses names and friendship (Swinburne, Li Po, Velazquez, Charles North) with a self-effacing intimacy that can be equal parts tender and abject, as in an elegy for the painter Barnett Newman: "It is difficult to breathe/ in his triple air of sublimity/ and difficult not to embellish my life." Towle has not been an active self-promoter, which might explain his lack of notoriety relative to many of his contemporaries. The low-key publication of this selected in thus very much in character; fans of James Tate or David Shapiro should be pointed to it directly. (July)