Quits: Late Poems

San Francisco: The Brick Row Book Shop, 2009, 2009. First edition, one of 300 copies printed. New.. 8vo, sapphire blue wrappers, stitched, printed paper label, 23 pages. ¶ A slim volume of fifteen poems by the distinguished poet, scholar and antiquarian bookseller whose first collection, Izmir, was published in 1959, and whose poetry has continually been published over the intervening fifty years. Arthur Freeman's poems are characterized by objectivity, clarity of design, hard focus, and vivid imagery - with a genie-in-the bottle reliance on tight but flexible form. And like all poets worth reading, his voice is unmistakably his own. Randall Jarrell once likened "a [good] poet" to "one who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times, and he is great." Arthur Freeman says he will settle for three or four, but higher estimates are welcome.