The Cool Eye  Stride 1993 ISBN 1 873012 49 7

"I never doubt Ferlinghetti. He's a master, a mentor, a mensch. I trust his work the same way I trust even the strongest stuff of Burroughs, or Beckett or Picasso. I'd follow 'em anywhere." [Ken Kesey] 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind is one of the world's best selling poetry books, with over a million copies sold since first publication in 1958. Ferlinghetti, founder of San Francisco's City Lights Bookshop and Press, continues to edit its magazine City Lights Journal. He is author of numerous poetry collections from Pictures of the Gone World (1955) to Endless Life: Selected Poems (New Directions, 1981). He has also published the novels Her and Love in the Days of Rage, plays, political satires and travel books, and translated the poems of Jacques Prévert. Well known too as a painter, Ferlinghetti has been called "one of our ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist, USA).

Among the most recent of Alexis Lykiard's many books are two highly-praised poetry collections Living Jazz (Tenormen Press, 1991) and Beautiful is Enough (Westwords, 1992). His translations from French include works by Lautréamont, Aragon, Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry's extraordinary novel Days And Nights (Atlas, 1989) and Surrealist Games (Redstone Press, 1991).