Given the changes in Coolidge's body of works, readers will likely have decided preferences. Coolidge begins as a gestural poet in the tradition of the New York poets and the painters of Abstract Expressionism (or gestural painting), becomes in the mid 1970s more of a Constructivist poet, only to resemble, since the early 1980s, a meditative-philosophical poet. These changes do not mean that Coolidge's work, taken as a whole, is incoherent; rather, they mean that Coolidge discloses poetic, linguistic, and rhetorical possibilities he does not himself choose to follow. In other words, Coolidge's influence spreads well beyond his most recent phase.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, on 26 February 1939 to Arlan Ralph and Sylvia Clark Coolidge, Clark Coolidge attended Brown University from 1956 to 1958 (where his father was a professor of music). His major was geology, not English. Music may well have been a keener influence on Coolidge than any...