Andrew Epstein Revisits Douglas Crase's The Revisionist

In the pages of Locus Solus, Andrew Epstein reflects on Douglas Crase's The Revisionist which has been out-of-print and was recently reissued in a new edition by Nightboat Books. "The poet and critic Douglas Crase published his first book of poems, The Revisionist, in 1981, to rapturous reviews," writes Epstein. From there: 

No less than Harold Bloom, that tireless canonizer, proclaimed that “Crase has every prospect of becoming one of the strong poets of his own generation,” and John Hollander declared it “the most powerful first book I have seen in a long time.”

For various reasons, The Revisionist has stood as Crase’s sole book of poems for nearly forty years, and has long been out-of-print.  Fortunately, it has just been reissued in a new edition by Nightboat Books, now gathered together with a more recent work titled The Astropastorals.

Crase has long been affiliated with the New York School poets, ever since he met and grew close with John Ashbery and James Schuyler in the 1970s, and became an important member of their circle.  Schuyler fans will recall that Crase and his partner Frank Polach are featured prominently in Schuyler’s great poem “Dining Out with Doug and Frank”: “Why is this poem / so long?  And full of death? / Frank and Doug are young and / beautiful and have nothing / to do with that.”

The new edition features a valuable introduction by Mark Ford, who reminds us of the “exclamations of wonder from poets and critics across the spectrum when it first appeared,” from Ashbery to Anthony Hecht to James Merrill.  The book’s reappearance has been greeted by glowing reviews – with Albert Mobilio including it in a “best poetry of the year” list for Hyperallergic (“this is verse so meticulous in its construction, exquisite in its intelligence, and ravishing in its imagery that fellow poets cannot help but feel both daunted and inspired by the achievement”) and Matthew Bevis reviewing it for the London Review of Books:  (‘The title poem of The Revisionist shapes an address to the nation as though it were whispering in a lover’s ear”).

Read on at Locus Solus.