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ROBERT LAX was born in Olean, New York, in 1915. He studied at Columbia University in the 1930s, where John Berryman, Ad Reinhardt, and Thomas Merton were among his contemporaries, and later worked for the New Yorker and Time before helping to found Jubilee magazine in 1953. After traveling for extended periods in Italy and France in the 1950s, he settled in Greece in 1962, first on the island of Kalymnos, then later on the island of Patmos. He died in 2000.
Among America's greatest poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words. -Richard Kostelanetz, New York Times Book Review Lax's early poems are a mix of emotionality...and formal experimentation...But his finest work can be seen in the previously unpublished sequence of poems, Port City: The Marseille Diaries. -Publishers Weekly Lax dispenses with metaphor and largely with ego . . . to present what he sees with elemental forcefulness, as if in strong Mediterranean sunlight . . . individual poems register as prayers and, more often, mystical visions. -Booklist
