X.J. Kennedy is a pseudonym for Joseph Charles Kennedy, who was born in dover, New Jersey. He was educated at Seton Hall College in South Orange, New Jersey, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.Sc. degree. He took an M.A. from Columbia University in 1951 and studied at the Sorbonne in 1955 and 1956. He then became a teaching fellow at the University of Michigan, and from 1956 until 1962 he was associated at Ann Arbor with other poets and writers such as Donald Hall, Bernard Waldrop, W.D. Snodgrass, and John Heath-Stubbs. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro from 1962 to 1963, and from 1963 until the present he has been a professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

To many readers Kennedy is more familiar as a compiler of poetry anthologies and textbooks than as a poet. Yet despite the fact that poetry is only...