The City Keeps: Selected and New Poems 1966-2014

Godfrey remains open to the minute particularities and imaginative wanderings of everyday life--the multitude of wayward thoughts, musings and associations, the erogenous zone of thinking and looking. --John Yau, Hyperallergic His syntax, at once lightning fast and completely casual (like Patriots receiver Randy Moss), runs slant patterns across convention. He incorporates vernacular, he blows fuses on cliches, and he scalpels away bookkeeping words (as Pound called them) to jump-cut high energy, emotive phrasings. --Forrest Gander, Harriet (The Poetry Foundation) For my money, there's no one writing better. I give away most of my books, but I won't give this away. --Alex Katz, in an interview by Amy Summerland, Boston Globe Godfrey hands us great gifts of richly unpredictable language, "the power and felicity of pronouns," an ever alert eye and ear, and a particular human life: these are made manifest and shared with elegance, integrity, and a seriousness always kept from descending to the obvious or solemn by the poet's tough and compassionate humor. --Anselm Hollo His genius rings true. --Peter Gizzi The combination of his gorgeous sentimentality and irresistible philosophical hauteur is like a cross between Latin music and Schopenhauer--simultaneously drawing us closer and further away--with a strong American conversational tone holding it together. --Ron Padgett