The poet Frank O’Hara moved to New York City in 1951—the same year that Jack Kerouac was working on his manuscript for On the Road in an apartment on West 20th Street in Manhattan. Although O’Hara was never considered part of the nascent Beat scene, their social circles overlapped (Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg are among the many who get cameos in O’Hara’s poems, rubbing shoulders with their fellow poet Kenneth Koch, the painter Larry Rivers and others). My favourite O’Hara poems are those he called his “I do this I do that” poems: written with casual skill, yet so detailed that each time they are read it feels like the first time, their lines opening to reveal small dioramas from O’Hara’s mid-century Manhattan life. “The Day Lady Died” is the best-known example: on his lunch hour, O’Hara spots a New York Post “with her face on it” and remembers “leaning on the john door in the 5 Spot / while she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.” Knopf’s 2008 take on O’Hara’s Selected Poems is edited by Mark Ford and includes about two-thirds of the poems from the 1974 selection edited by Donald Allen. These poems have been supplemented by about fifty other poems and a half-dozen prose pieces: a timely update of an important poet’s best work.