[In the following mixed review, Everett considers the poems in Cosmopolitan Greetings as candid yet inconsistent.]

It will be forty years in October since Allen Ginsberg gave his historic first reading of “Howl” (in San Francisco), the poem which so spectacularly launched his poetic career and put the Beat Generation on the American literary and cultural map. Looking back at the various outraged responses the poem inspired, the one that now seems strangest is not the (unsuccessful) prosecution for obscenity (some of Ginsberg's poems still can't be broadcast on American radio during the day) but the objection from the literary “establishment” that the poem was wild and wholly lacking in craft. What has become clear over the intervening years is just how systematic and considered Ginsberg's methods are. Indeed, next to this anarchic beatnik, many formalist and traditionalist poets seem like brave improvisers, going it without the kind of aesthetic (and ideological) framework that Ginsberg has always so readily invoked to explain and justify his art.

Admittedly, his central principle of composition is spontaneity, but this is really just a desire to be candid, to use his ordinary thoughts rather than trying to come up with something more impressive for the purpose of the poem. How the thoughts become sentences—the actual technique—is conditioned in large part by the complementary principle, derived from Williams and Pound, of imagistic compression: “Maximum information, minimum number of syllables”, as the title-poem of his new collection, Cosmopolitan Greetings, has it. “Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.” Ginsberg reduces to a minimum words which don't contribute something new to what he's saying, and which would appear only for the sake of grammatical correctness. Hence, pronouns, conjunctions and the articles are frequently omitted, and nouns gather in piles, mystical sparks flying from their unusual juxtapositions. To sustain the highest possible energy and density of expression, Ginsberg also tends to call on the weightiest part of speech the context will allow, using nouns very often as adjectives and adjectives as adverbs.

In Cosmopolitan Greetings, as in his previous work, the elliptical style works best where it adds urgency and surprise to the poetry as well as economy. No amount of compression can rescue most of the poems here in Ginsberg's favoured catalogue form, because they reiterate their basic (usually political) statements in such predictable ways. One exception, and perhaps his most powerful recent poem, is “The Charnel Ground”, an inventory of blighted urban lives reminiscent of “Howl” in its energetic progress through a succession of succinctly summarized scenes; on the page, if not in performance, it packs a stronger political punch than all the book's satirical songs and chants of protest put together. Less ambitious but more consistently successful than the catalogue poems are the personal narratives and reflections which skip blithely along with the enthusiastic yet inconsequential and uninsistent air of notebook jottings. It may have been this effect as much as any autobiographical impulse that made Ginsberg see all his poems as a personal record and so arrange them in chronological order, appending to each the exact date (and often time) of its composition.

Now that he's nearly seventy, the record is inevitably dominated by the experience of age and the prospect of death, and it is this subject-matter rather than any technical advance that distinguishes Cosmopolitan Greetings from all his earlier volumes. Ginsberg deals with age and death from a characteristically wide range of perspectives and in the full range of his characteristic manners, from the provocatively tasteless to the charmingly grandiose. He is the lucky “Senior Citizen” with discounts on public transport and at the movies who can't “imagine how these young people make a life, make a living”; the chirpy sexagenarian “ready for next week's angiogram” and full of praise for his “good old asshole”—“out with the dumps, in with the condom'd/orgasmic friend”—for still working so well after a lifetime's wear and tear; and the ageing poet, happy to “settle for Immortality” through his writing alone but all too aware that he can't reproduce his early poetic originality and success (“why can't I write another ‘Howl’?”). Most touching and impressive, though, is Ginsberg the regretful and fearful old man in poems such as “May Days 1988”, poems in which the usual invulnerable, if deprecatory, assurance of his self-presentation finds its sternest artistic and existential challenge since he dealt with his mother's insanity in “Kaddish” (1961). Plagued by an insomniac old-age version of the age-old debate between body and soul in part IV of “After Lalon”, he retreats to the simple facts of the matter—who, where, when:

If I don't get some rest I'll die faster
If I sleep I'll lose
                                                            my chance for salvation—
asleep or awake, Allen
                    Ginsberg's in bed
                    in the middle of the night.