Falling Water: Poems

"As a poet who teaches philosophy, John Koethe knows better than most of us the uses and dissatisfactions of both disciplines, if indeed they are disciplines. In this ravishing and haunted book he comes face to face with the time when 'more than half my life is gone,' and must try to find the meaning of 'a childish/dream of love, and the loss of love,/and all the intricate years between.' As funny and fresh as it is tragic and undeceived, FALLING WATER ranks with Wallace Stevens's AURORAS OF AUTUMN as one of the profoundest meditations on existence ever formulated by an American poet." --John Ashbery