Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970-1995

This chronological selection, edited by the poet himself, liberally culls from a body of work that includes more than a dozen hard-to-find small press poetry volumes. It's fronted by an autobiographical reflection, in which Codrescu sets the stage for his poems: walking us through his years of revolution and passion in New York in the Sixties, evoking benign and exalted emanations of a liberated pleasure-dome San Francisco in the Seventies, charting darkening and deepening notes picked up later among North Coast redwood forests, and tracing the sober rage of more recent years of argument and reportage. The distance between the two figures of engagement, embattled critic and involved poet, Codrescu reminds us, has for him always been considerable: My own work has had its own lyric momentum and mysterious drive that has little to do with the quarrels in question. Andrei Codrescu has always been poet first of all.