About the book (from jacket flap):
An outstanding new collection of poems from Allen Ginsberg at age sixty, White Shroud confirms the reputation of America’s best-known poet for bold experiment and provocative vers.
The title poem “White Shroud”, is a dream apparition, a bittersweet magical epilogue to Ginsberg’s “terrible masterpiece” “Kaddish”, the elegy for his mother written 25 years ago. Dream visions run like a thread through much of this book, including an encounter with the spirit of William Carlos Williams, who dictates instructions to the dreaming poet in verse remarkably akin to William’s own form.
Ginsberg continues his experiments with poetic modes in this collection: outrageous political rock-and-roll lyrics and rap, surreal anecdotes, Eastern Doha and precise seventeen-syllable, one-line haikus, vivid erotic narratives, gay heroic couplets, national blues, danceable instruction for classic Buddhist sitting meditation, Armageddon nightmare satire and open-form improvisation, “first thought, best thought” contemplative pieces modeled on mind process, descriptive sketches, a rhymeless sonnet, translation from police state verse, tai chi practice thoughts, didactic instruction to theists of the Moral Majority, paraphrase of a Greek Anthology fragment, and a series of poems written in mainland China – authoritative in its echoes of T’ang dynasty wisdom tone.
