Selected Poems by Frank O’HaraEdited by Mark FordAlfred A. Knopf, 2008

When I like Frank O’Hara’s poems, I like them lots, yet I didn’t like this book as a whole as much as I’d expected to. What I like best are his shorter and more straightforward poems, his “I do this I do that” poems, as he called them. I like “Walking to Work” and “Music” and “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” (which begins, “It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering/if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch”) and “Personal Poem” and the one that starts with “Krushchev is coming on the right day!”. I love “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” too, and I like some of the poems about art: “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “Joseph Cornell” and “Digression on Number 1, 1948.” I like the sweetness and sexiness of “To the Harbormaster,” and the beautiful city-images—the whole first stanza of “Beer for Breakfast” (chestnut trees and blue skies), or this bit in “Having a Coke with You”: “in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other.” I like the concrete better than the surreal, and there’s more of the latter in these poems than I expected.