David Melnick: Nice

David Melnick’s ‘Nice: Collected Poems’ spans twenty crucial years of gay life and experimentation with poetic form, bringing together four masterworks of American literature: ’Eclogs’ (1967-70), ten episodes in the urban afterlife of the pastoral; ’PCOET’ (1972), written in an unknown tongue, verse for a world that’s yet to be; ‘Men in Aida’ (1983-85), Melnick’s masterpiece, a giddy epic of queer community; and ‘A Pin’s Fee’ (1988), a backward glance and elegy, a cry of pain, a howl of anger.