Ferlinghetti has published nine collections of poems, from which Endless Life draws its two-hundred pages. Ferlinghetti obviously thinks of himself as a political poet, in the tradition of the Russian Voznesensky, and as political poets go, he is not bad. Of course, like Lowell, say, or Levertov, he can get a little self-righteous and dull when he gets worked up…. Still, what often saves Ferlinghetti is his light touch, his fine sense of the comic…. (p. 277)

In Endless Life … we can see a distinct change in direction in Ferlinghetti's approach. The early poems (from Pictures of the Gone World and A Coney Island of the Mind), while slightly experimental in the unjustified left margins which we have come to associate with Ferlinghetti's poetry, are essentially traditional lyric poems dealing with the larger subjects: love, death, beauty, time. In other words, the poems often engage suffering ("The World is...