Rachel Hadas reviews The Biographer by David M. Katz in Able Muse Magazine
“As the title of his new book promises, David M. Katz is fascinated by life writing. He’s also an avid lover of poetry both as a reader and a writer—a poet whose poems often reminisce about his encounters with other poets in life, or on the page, or both. A previous collection, In Praise of Manhattan, features the villanelle “Elegy for A.G.” that both touches upon Allen Ginsberg’s poetics and adds a more personal note: “First thought best thought, the master said. / Where’s Allen now? Among the dead.” My own first thought about The Biographer was that this collection would consist wholly of poems about poets; but Katz’s new book is subtler and more various than that. Many poems here engage with the poet’s own past. Of these, many are enriched by references to places—the Lower East Side, Tompkins Square Park, Atlantic City, Spanish Harlem, Riverside Drive, West End Avenue.” . . .
