Of And

Author: Keith Waldrop

Publisher: Guillemot Press (2017)

Of And is a new and beautiful short sequence of poetry, printed on Mohawk Superfine papers with GF Smith Colorplan covers and featuring cover art by Tony Martin. 

"Prayer is at the core of this tiny recent book from Guillemot. These prayers are offered to ‘gods one need not / believe in’, an idea that, to me at least, summons up that New England Transcendentalist tradition with which Waldrop seems to have so much in common, as when Emerson wrote ‘We have no experience of a creator, and therefore we know of none’. . . . these poems are prayers to an unacknowledged god who has no need of them, an exercise in perception with the inward looking eye of the ‘god in ruins’. What Waldrop seems most to believe in is the act of writing, the word isolated for emphasis . . . Of And has the feeling of something ending, of being both coda and codicil. If so, it is a fittingly quite, voluminously quiet, closure to a remarkable poetic career."

–BIlly Mills

"Keith Waldrop is a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet."

–Ben Lerner