Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118158 in Books
• Published on: 1985-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 75 pages

Review
Capper Kaplinski At The North Side Cue Club
Cave Painting
How To
Lana
Lost
Marge
Names
New Hartford
Phone
Plain Song
Reflections
Sam And Poll Go Back To The City
Septic Tank
Shake, Well Before Using
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Customer Reviews

from the farm to the rust belt
In Asphalt Georgics, a significant shift in the setting and style of poetry takes place for Mr. Carruth. He had moved from rural Vermont to Syracuse, NY, to take a position teaching at the university. Unless I've been misinformed, the move was one of convenience, as the children of professors would receive free tuition. This poetry was the product of a practical time, when preferences gave way to necessity.

So how does this affect the poetry? For one, Carruth makes an effort to take on the subtle speech patterns and rhythms of Syracuse and environs. This is mostly successful, and not such a small feat. The unique rhythm lends the characters a reality that is both immediate and charming. But the main change comes in his approach. Carruth has been taken from a relatively idyllic setting to a city that, around this time, was rapidly joining the Rust Belt. The setting of Vermont hayfields have given way to strip malls and tract houses, which at that point had lost any sort of artificial lustre they once had. His characters of Spaid and Tanck are bemusedly cynical creations. Although Carruth always brought realism into his work, a deep disatisfaction with suburban and urban American life colors the atmosphere of the poems, and, if you've read much Carruth, you know that atmosphere is everything. I'm hesitant to call this book darker than his others; he's too complex a poet to simply write a "dark" book and a "light" book. But the book left me feeling more uneasy than his others, for what that's worth.

And any book which can affect you in such a strong way deserves a fifth star, I think.

Lamenting the decline of the wilderness.
Hayden Carruth, Asphalt Georgics (New Directions, 1985)

Asphalt Georgics stands well out from the Carruth corpus in that the whole book, every poem therein (of which there are thirteen), is written in iambic, either quadrameter or pentameter. Thematically, it makes sense, as much of what is here is a jaundiced look at the excessive civilizing of Vermont, something which Carruth has been despairing of almost as long as he's been writing. Never has he done so as eloquently as he does here, though there is some inconsistency in the quality of the work (however minor that inconsistency may be, as is usually the case with Carruth) and the repeated rhythm tends to make the pieces run together. More a book for browsing than for dedicated reading, but another fine one. *** ½