With his unpremeditated, fresh style, his observations and his autobiographical - not confessional - poetry, Frank O'Hara broke with the academic traditions of the 1950s and became the life of soul of New York school of poets, depicting a city of "jazz, good painting and black-and-white movies". For this volume Donald Allen has selected some of the finest work of Frank O'Hara (1926-66). Offbeat, vivid and spontaneous, O'Hara's poetry broke with the dry orthodoxy of the current trend to create a fluid poetry, analogous in concept to the paintings of Pollock, Kline and de Kooning. It is, according to John Ashbery, "a remarkable poetry - both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it - not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space".