Walking Backwards

November 15, 2018
Walking Backwards gathers poet-philosopher Koethe's ample, award-winning body of work. Organized chronologically, it contains a well-balanced sampling, with slightly more weight given to more recent books, such as The Swimmer (2016), and added punch from a section of new poems. Like first-generation New York School poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler, who influenced his work, Koethe writes poems that have a casual tone and refined wit. They ask human, albeit philosophically inclined, questions about time, self, and the human condition. While Koethe shares sentiments tending toward the romantic, the poems utterly resist sentimentality. Instead, they lean into acceptance, whether of disappointment or delight, and that cheerfulness of disillusionment, the exhilaration of No. Now in his seventies, Koethe has more than earned the right to reflect on the past, consider the sum of a life, title the last poem in his collection, Thinking about Death, and even encapsulate an outlook toward the future, The parts of it I'll live to see might matter to me, / The rest of it is unimaginable, which makes it poetry. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)