Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems Book

A COLLECTION OF UNPUBLISHED POEMS FROM ONE OF THE MOST DISTINCTIVE POETIC VOICES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

of an evening real as paint on canvas.

The kind that makes me ache to have the gift for dusting off clichés:

not, make it new, but, see it, hear it, freshly.

The context (good morrow, haven’t we met in this context before?)

in which, squelch, a brush lifted a load of pigment from the thick glass palette, and, concentrated,

as though he saw neither the work in hand nor the subject,

the painter began.

—from “A Blue Shadow Painting”

Other Flowers brings together 165 unseen poems from James Schuyler, one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed writers. This carefully arranged edition presents a broad range of Schuyler’s work, spanning from the early 1950s until his death in 1991. These poems exhibit Schuyler’s virtuosity in drawing from real life, interpersonal history, nature, and pop culture to create reverberant portraits of the everyday. To read these poems is to rediscover the fresh clarity and grandeur of even the smallest things. Other Flowers confirms Schuyler’s status as one of the most important figures in contemporary poetics.

The New York Times - Stephen Burt

…19 years after his death and 17 after his Collected Poems, this trove of previously unpublished work shows just how much fun (and how unsettling) Schuyler can be. Campy, cryptic or over the top, sometimes resembling verse diaries or word games…the poems slow down to reveal their serious goals…Many poets tell us we ought to enjoy every moment. Schuyler's verse, by precept and example, can actually help us do it.