Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School

"Written in a style that is admirably clear and fluid, sophisticated without succumbing to jargon, and faithful to complex ideas without oversimplification, Tim Gray's Urban Pastoral is an engaging meditation on a topic of central importance to the New York School: While many literary critics touch on or allude to the urban pastoral in their discussions of the New York poets, until now no one has dedicated a book-length study to the subject.... As the first sustained treatment and explicit conceptualization of the urban pastoral, this work should prove helpful to scholars of other periods who are searching for guidance." ---Susan Rosenbaum, Author, Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading

"Timothy Gray's Urban Pastoral takes on the utterly worthwhile task of considering the New York School's relationship to both nature writing and nature itself. Speculative, awed, conversational, and intricate in turn, Gray's study provides uncommon contexts and a refreshing cast of characters through which to consider some of the most exciting, beautiful writing of our time. What moves me most, however, is Gray's benevolent yet through dedication throughout to dismantling any `heuristic binaries' (city/country, domesticity/mobility, etc.) that might impede our full enjoyment and understanding of the poems and the complex lives from which they emanated."---Maggie Nelson, Author, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions and Bluets

"We knew Koch, Guest, O'Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler thrived on the gritty, buoyant clank of city life, but that they drew from a secret fountain there only the Brill Building really let on, until now. In seven crisply argued, essayistic chapters, Gray lets us see and feel the invisible paradise glowing within the visible form of the subway, the skyscraper, the tenement bank, the tattoo parlor, a heaven `growing in the street/right up through the concrete, but soft and sweet and dreaming."---Kevin Killian, Author, Little Men

Timothy Gray is a professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and the author of Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community (Iowa, 2006).