The last word on the GOAT poems, by A.R. Ammons

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For those who’ve followed the adventures of my old friend Goat over the last few weeks as I’ve posted them, many thanks.

For anyone interested in the entire collection, I’ll put together a PDF of this work and have it on this site for download before the New Year. There is still a print version of the book available through Amazon with black and white versions of Tom Williams’s great linocut art,  but no copies of the original letterpress are available (at least not that I know of!)

Finally, for the last word on this sequence, I’ll hand it off to National Book Award winning poet A.R. Ammons, who wrote this about the Goat poems:

“A sequence in which the imagination is marvelously free to leap, convert, disjoint, dispose re-dispose as the moment prompts, but a sequence in which restraint, compression, intention, craft are all alive and conscious in a fine discipline. The rambunctious is made sadly tame, sulled, schooled in ‘Goat’s Style is Cramped’  so naturally and with such apparent ease and one is so caught up in the poem itself that one has to break away to become aware of how flawlessly the poem’s made. I like these poems very much and consider them a rare achievement. Though energetic and almost dismissively swift, they startle one with sharp loneliness, compassion, loss. I’m afraid I cannot find anything wrong with them.”

On to new stuff! Happy holidays to all.

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