Lunch Poems

US: City Lights Publishers, 1964. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number ninetee n in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's fre shest and most accomplished collection of poetry. Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald A llen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his monumental The New American P oetry in 1960, it contains some of the poet's best known works including "T he Day Lady Died," "Ave Maria," and "Poem" [Lana Turner has collapsed!]. Th ese are the compelling and formally inventive poems casually composed, for example, in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at luncht ime or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading that made O' Hara a dynamic leader of the New York School of poets. "O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and espec ially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few book s of his era show less age. Dwight Garner, New York Times "As collections go, none brings . . . quality to the fore more than the thi rty-seven Lunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights.Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review "What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of Lunch Poems: not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of.