Walking Backwards

This collection draws from 10 earlier books and concludes with new poems, and as Koethe writes more, he knows less: Whereas the earlier poems swell with certainty, the later revel in a secular version of what theologians call the mysterium tremendum, the fearful mystery we can neither fathom nor turn away from . . . When someone has been writing and publishing as long as he has, in such quantity and at such a high level of distinction, it's not easy to put your finger on the moment at which his poetry stopped being one thing and became another. Still, it's clear that at some point, something happened to him -- life, maybe. --David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review

Koethe has written lasting poetry that deserves anthology status. His poems are innovative elegies that mourn the loss not of people nor a way of life but, rather, a way of existing. He longs for a settled mode of being he can never recover. Koethe's best poems--and there are many--own the fine modulating balance of voice in which the rendition of events is matched by a precise, lightly lamenting song from which myriad possibilities of meaning can be inferred. The work in Walking Backwards achieves a brilliant originality by manifesting exactly that balance, carrying willing readers intimately into one human being's near-simultaneous experience of enthusiasm and disbelief. --Kevin Clark, The Georgia Review