In 1973, at the age of twenty-three,
Jim Carroll
burst upon the poetry scene with his first collection,
Living at the Movies
, a book of vivid and inventive verse that won him comparisons to everyone from
Arthur Rimbaud
to
Frank O'Hara
.
Carroll's first new book of poetry in more than a decade,
Void of Course
presents work composed over the last two years. His major themes—love, friendship, desire, time and memory, and, above all, the ever-present city—emerge in an atmosphere where dream and reality mingle on equal terms. These seventy-seven poems range from graphic, sensuous shorter pieces to edgy stream-of-consciousness prose poems to longer, more contemplative works such as "While She's Gone," an eerie tour de force of longing over a departed lover.
establishes that Carroll's power and purity of vision are stronger than ever.