"Intensely serious beneath a surface of lightness and wit, Kenneth Koch's poems "maintain power," Denis Donoghue wrote, "by rarely choosing to exert it." Koch's virtuosity - he has written many plays, an extravagant novel (The Red Robins), and short stories (Hotel Lambosa), and has done numerous collaborations with painters - seems part of a continuing and energetic attempt to write (in the words of Ariosto) "things never said in prose before or in verse." Almost every poem is a new kind of poem, a new flight - in this volume, for example, the theme and variations of "One Train May Hide Another," the "Poems by Ships at Sea," the post-Apollinairean couplets of "A Time Zone," the Chinese poetry-influenced quatrains of "The First Step," and the hundred or so brief poems that together make up the poem "On Aesthetics.""--BOOK JACKET.