Maximum Security Ward and Other Poems

Maximum Security Ward and other poems, including the whole of the title-sequence (1970) and generous selections from Graffiti (1959) and Asbestos Phoenix (1968), at last provides a full view of a poet whose humor and humanity together make him our truest descendant of Mark Twain. Graffiti offers "high-spirited footnotes, intensely personal yet at the same time public" (New York Times Book Review) and "poems so lightly wise, and wisely light, that his work confirms Plato's old fear of letting poets run at large" (Christian Science Monitor). Asbestos Phoenix, "a book that alone would place Ramon Guthrie among the major poets of the mid-century" (The Nation), comprises poems in which "Guthrie carries on from the best directions of the twenties in his special mixture of liveliness with seriousness, and of artistic exploration with a deeply informed sense of structure" (New York Times Book Review).