FACING EDEN: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area was created to accompany the 1995 museum exhibition of the same name at the de Young Memeorial Museum in San Francisco. The fact that it retains popularity as a Book is a testimony of how fine the actual catalogue is. Beautifully illustrated and written, the idiosyncrasies of the Bay Area topography are first addressed with photographs and maps and drawings dating back to the 1890s. Then these seeds of ideas are followed through the great painters of the Bay Area and for many readers this will be the first exposure to the unique quality of composition, light, and stance that identifies some very major painters with a Regionalism that competes soundly with the Hudson River School! Here are the works of Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Andy Goldsworth, Stephen deStaebler, and David Park along side less well known painters such as Gordon Cook, Jess, and Michael Gregory. But the catalogue and exhibition are careful to include the three dimensional works of Bob Arneson,, Tony Cragg and Richard Shaw while introducing less well known works by such fine painters as Christopher Brown, Robert Bechtle, and Richard Estes. The book is divided into seven sections, each accompanied by a fine essay by some very fine art historians. And just as the book begins with factual photographs of the area that inspired the art, it ends with a beautifully rich section on art photographs of the 'interpreting' the lovely facts of nature. Highly recommended reading and looking.

For those looking for the poems, go to the Collected, Lunch Poems, and Meditations in an Emergency. But for the O'Hara afficionados among us who want to know things beyond the work, this is better than Brad Gooch's biography City Poet: the virtual album of photos is stunning, it weighs less, and it probably has all that one wants from a biography anyway--that is to say, uncensored recollections of the man from his friends, pals, and lovers.

Highlights include Peter Schjeldahl's obit/feature from the Village Voice in 1966 and Patsy Southgate's somewhat salacious recounting of a particular evening with O'Hara.

The details of Frank's condition just before his death are somewhat wrenching, but the memories of his emotional state are happy ones...Enjoy.

"Special care is language," wrote Ted Berrigan about Bill Berkson's early poems of the 1960s. Now we have what might be termed 'the middle period' -- Berkson's poetry and "extended prose" from the mid-1970s to 1989. There are stories and abstractions, a lot of weather, domestic affairs, changes of light, relaxed saxophone-type solos over catchy themes. But this is polyphonic poetry. No narcissism: the focus on what is there; the objective, the realization, delight.

The most incredible collection of mindless drivel I have ever read. Save your money.

This collection sees Bill Berkson's poetry through from the startling, precocious works of his early 20s, when he entered as a junior member of the New York School, to the increasingly inventive verses and prose poems written in California in the 1970s. The variety itself is stunning. The diction is elegant without pretense. Observation, dream life, urbane candor, tenderness, bravado -- each has a place, or multiple places, in Berkson's mindful whirl.