New & Selected Poems

Charles O. Hartman

“Charles O. Hartman’s New & Selected Poems will finally establish his rightful place as at least one of the best poets of his generation. It takes a large collection to reveal the range, depth, intricacy, and inventive playfulness of his very very fine sensibility. Most of all I love his intelligence—his refusal of sentimentality that finds an angle for the release of unexpected yet rich and complex feelings, and his range of attitudes and situations matched by astonishing metrical inventiveness and resonance. (‘Songlines/ tune/ the travels.’) This intelligence makes for a range that beggars most poets—from elegant short dimeter poems to several sustained and complex long poems on topics ranging from becoming familiar with exotic places to establishing attitudes toward the ways new technologies affect possibilities for feeling and for thinking, or for continuing to think that feeling matters.”—Charles Altieri

“Charles O. Hartman is a musician’s poet. Those of us who spend our time looking for melodies, and for ways to hang them together, recognize that same impulse in his work; his poems sound like the best Tin Pan Alley songs, graceful and concise. His cadences are as unforced as Lester Young’s, and his language as refined. These verses sing. ”—Steve Swallow

“Charles is a precisionist of language, an improviser searching familiar scales for a wrong note, a word or phrase, that can take him past regular habits of meaning or melody to some new kind of right place.”—David Antin