Selected Poems

Keith Waldrop is a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet. His accomplishment is difficult to describe because his work refuses, in Bartelby-like fashion, the twin traps of impassivity and affectation: On my one hand, / stasis -- on the / other, striving for effect. In one of his very few interviews, Waldrop says: I think the worst fault a poem can have is striving for effect. Waldrop never strives
instead, he haunts his presence is all the more powerful for barely being there, like a ghost you discover in a familiar photograph."