... is, I think, one of the great underrated poets of the 20th century. Now that the dust of the Beats has settled and we've all put out Gregory Corso books to the back of the shelf, the time has come to give Weldon some of the veneration he deserves. The prompt for this was Anthony Lane's piece on kees in an old New Yorker that I read on Sunday, and this morning I've been rereading a lot of Kees's poems in his rather slim Collected edition. They''re so good - he manages to combine a fat woman in a bathing suit and the human condition and not make it seem flippant or silly. The easiest way to imagine Kees is to think of Cary Grant playing Richie Manic and you've got the idea. Like Richie, Kees vanished by a bridge (the Golden Gate in SF) and was never seen again. You'd think this would have secured a huge mythic status, but certainly in the UK he's a cult figure at best. Less self-consciously weighty than Lowell or Jarrell he's a truly moving voice for those who discover him.