SOURCE: Chidley, Joe. “Counterculture Forever.” MacLean's 109, no. 46 (11 November 1996): 95-96.

In the following review, Chidley considers the renewed commercial and critical interest in Ginsberg's verse as well as the poet's political and social concerns.

Five storeys up in a nondescript apartment building, workmen are hammering and sawing, renovating a sunny Manhattan loft in a cacophony of Italian song and shouted curses. Amid the clatter, lying on a modest double bed, Allen Ginsberg—original beatnik, gay iconoclast, Buddhist peacenik, hippie guru and, arguably, America's Last Famous Poet—is taking a nap. As incense wafts through the room, he seems a pool of repose surrounded by what he once called “the vast animal soup” of the everyday world. It is tempting to view the professorial, diminutive gentleman as a saintly figure—a madman-poet who has at last found peace. But as Ginsberg, roused from his sleep, begins to talk about his...