Selected Poems

by James Tate

Overview

An award-winning gathering of exquisite poems by a celebrated poet.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1992)
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1992)

The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection Reckoner. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate has been described as a surrealist. If that is what he is, his surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by his unillusioned subversion and candor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819511928
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	06/14/1991
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	250
Sales rank:	550,370
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

JAMES TATE grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of The Lost Pilot (1967), The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970), Hints to Pilgrims (1971), Absences (1972), Viper Jazz (1976), Riven Doggeries (1979), Constant Defenders (1983), and Reckoner (1986). He teaches at the University of Massachusetts and lives in Amherst.

Read an Excerpt

There is so much to be corrected here,
so many scribbles and grumbles, blind premonitions./ How does one interpret, on this late branch, the unexpected?

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Heart
Summer
Power in America
Death of a Grandmother
Adoration of the moon
The Talker
Mountain, Fire, Thornbush
The Prophet Announces
Exodus
Aleph
A Short History Feast of the Ram's Horn
Spirit of Rabbi Nachman
Battle Report
News of the World
Monday
Past Time
Sunday Morning
ABC of Culture
Purities
Lines for the Ancient Scribe
The Night
The Six Hundred Thousand Letters
National Cold Storage Company
For WCW
Days and Nights
The Light is Sown
By the Women's House of Detention
Sister
River Side Drive
Ditty
Where I Am Now
A Message From Rabbi Nachman Lines for Erwin R. Goodenough (1893-1965)
Cross Country
For Delmore Schwartz
From Martin Buber
Through the Boroughs
Notes at 46
Riding Westward
Saul's Progress
Veteran
A Gift
Like a Beach
Muse Poem
City Portrait
47th Street
Cry of Small Rabbits
August
Domestic Matters
O Seasons
A Notebook
Musical Shuttle
A Realization
Lines
Things Seen
July
May
City
The Wish
Learning
On a Sunday
Brooklyn Heights
Cummings
Blue Eyes
The End
A Memorial
Saturday
Battlements
A Jerusalem Notebook
Two Cornell Deaths
Cynthia
These are the Streets
Celebrations
Questions
New York Summer
Meditations on a Brooklyn Bench
Lower East Side
Years Ago
Lessons
Lit Crit
Bible Lesson
For Paul Celan and Primo Levi
Loyalty
On Writing
Aubade
How it Ended
The Defense
In Tiberias
History
What It Feels Like
Remembering
Epitaph
Prague
949
Choices
Hart
Generations
The Ticket
Italy,1996
Traveling Trough Ireland

What People are Saying About This

John Ashbery

“…allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting.”

From the Publisher

"This volume performs a valuable service by drawing together the best of Tate's work from many individual collections, some of them now quite rare. It allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting. Not unexpectedly, it confirms his standing as one of the finest voices of his generation—John Ashbery. A poet of mad wit and stunning anecdote. Tate is now in the fullness of his powers. A volume not to be missed"—Julian Moynahan

""Anthropologist, editor, critic and translator, Nathaniel Tarn is above all a poet. Poetry is at the center of his personality and his activity. His work, in full growth, reveals a rich temperament, a remarkable linguistic inventiveness and a vision both original and universal.""—Octavio Paz, recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize of Literature

"Ignatow's poems grow right out of the American concrete like ginkgo and ailanthus treesThere is an excitement that grows on one in his sober truthfulness and the beautiful simplicity of his language and rhythms."—Denise Levertov

"allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting."—John Ashbery

""Despite that many have been hard to find, Tarn's books have inspired a wild, almost religious devotion among readers. Long anticipated, The Selected Poems is a tremendous force field in which world and perception collaborate in innovative formal 'architextures,' a language that has no like.""—Forrest Gander, author of Torn Awake

Julian Moynahan

"This volume performs a valuable service by drawing together the best of Tate's work from many individual collections, some of them now quite rare. It allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting. Not unexpectedly, it confirms his standing as one of the finest voices of his generation"--John Ashbery. "A poet of mad wit and stunning anecdote. Tate is now in the fullness of his powers. A volume not to be missed"

Editorial Reviews

"...he has the rare ability to be very, very funny on the page..."—New York Times Book Review

"Shapiro writes in sardonic reverence . . . His poetry is a 'practical use / Of mysterious names.' It is modest, usually simple, but precise, courageous, and unflinching in its sadness."—Hayden Carruth, The Nation

"Working within the conventions of alienation and isolation, [Shapiro] develops a quietly distinctive and forceful idiom . . . Pre-figured in the earlier poems on Jewish and Old Testament themes, and developed in increasingly flexible forms, he makes good his ironic claim of 'praise [of] an age that has no monuments.' Because his irony works dramatically, the brief soliloquies he presents in deliberately low-keyed terms are often surprisingly moving."—Samuel French Morse, New York Times Book Review

"This volume performs a valuable service by drawing together the best of Tate's work from many individual collections, some of them now quite rare. It allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting. Not unexpectedly, it confirms his standing as one of the finest voices of his generation—John Ashbery. A poet of mad wit and stunning anecdote. Tate is now in the fullness of his powers. A volume not to be missed"—Julian Moynahan

""Anthropologist, editor, critic and translator, Nathaniel Tarn is above all a poet. Poetry is at the center of his personality and his activity. His work, in full growth, reveals a rich temperament, a remarkable linguistic inventiveness and a vision both original and universal.""—Octavio Paz, recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize of Literature

"Ignatow's poems grow right out of the American concrete like ginkgo and ailanthus treesThere is an excitement that grows on one in his sober truthfulness and the beautiful simplicity of his language and rhythms."—Denise Levertov

"allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting."—John Ashbery

""Despite that many have been hard to find, Tarn's books have inspired a wild, almost religious devotion among readers. Long anticipated, The Selected Poems is a tremendous force field in which world and perception collaborate in innovative formal 'architextures,' a language that has no like.""—Forrest Gander, author of Torn Awake

From the Publisher