Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1553545 in Books
• Published on: 1993-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This is the companion volume to Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992. "Here am I--drowned, living, loving, and insane" the first poem ends. Yet even taking on a nervous breakdown as a subject does not throw this poet into a confessional mode. The work here seems to break every rule of modern poetry, yet it succeeds. Carruth speaks in generalities about concepts such as Ecstasy and Death. Emotional landscapes are set against the harsh New England winters, creating a force of nature as violent and complicated as Robinson Jeffers's California. The veiled, elegiac stance in early sequences sets the stage for the most powerful and lyrical work in Carruth's oeuvre, the book-length "Sleeping Beauty." Here the woman, reclining in a Vermont landscape, becomes a collage of all women: friends, strangers, literary figures: "North / Means the way, loneliness, a snow-blurred field, / Existence, seeking what a life is worth." The poet relates her dreams, haunted by male figures whose names begin with H --Hamlet, Hitler, HIV. This volume displays the huge range, both in theme and form, of a poet who pushes his art to its limits, then beyond.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This companion to the award-winning Collected Shorter Poems ( LJ 4/1/92) encompasses ten previously published long poems written between 1957 and 1983, five of which appeared together in the 1970 volume For You . As Carruth admits in his introductory note, not all the pieces here are among his most critically acclaimed, but certainly some are among his best and most ambitious. Few poetic commemorations of a state are as evocative or witty as the plain-spoken "Vermont," and "The Sleeping Beauty," with its 125 verse paragraphs--by turns lyrical and harrowing, filigreed and abstract--stands as one of the most challenging and rewarding poetic sequences of the last 25 years. "Nailed to the raft of sense, swept by the magnitudes," Carruth gives the imagination full use of his considerable learning and prosodic skill, no matter how close to or far from "the authentic world" it takes him.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This complement to Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems (1992) rounds up 10 poems ranging in length from 6 pages (a few of the Collected Shorter are longer) to 70 and stylistically to include blank verse, a Whitmanian long line, Carruth's distinctive verse paragraphs, free verse of greater and less regular organization, and even a few rhymed quatrains. No doubt about it, the most immediately accessible is "Vermont," Carruth's verse essay on his longtime home state, its equally longtime status as a haven for poets, its granitic temperament, its ferocious weather, and its resemblance to life itself. Next most appealing, and artistically as impressive and even more cosmic in its ambitions and implications, is the big poem on love and creativity, originally published as a separate book, The Sleeping Beauty; then the two elegies, "My Father's Face" and "Mother," and "North Winter," a sequence of nature observations as crystalline and absorbing as any in classical Chinese poetry. If they do not show Carruth to be as protean as did the totality of the Collected Shorter Poems, these 10 big, largely autobiographical works impress upon us his stature and integrity as poetic thinker. Ray Olson

Customer Reviews

More Lessons from the Master
W. H. Auden, in his introduction to 19th Century British Minor Poets, established five criteria for being major, of which a candidate must satisfy at least three and a half. The poet must be prolific, demonstrate "wide range in subject matter and treatment," evidence "originality of vision and style," show mastery of verse technique, and continue maturing as a poet until death. Hayden Carruth meets all these conditions, as his Collected Longer Poems demonstrates by itself; taken together with his Collected Shorter Poems (1992), it marks Carruth as a preeminent master. The poems were composed between 1957 and 1983 and have been published in various collections, only one previously unavailable except in a fine-press edition. Three are written in Carruth's trade-mark "paragraphs," rhymed, variably metered fifteen-line stanzas, including The Sleeping Beauty, the heart of Carruth's oeuvre to date. Other poems in the collection are written in sprawling Whitmanesque lines, tercets, free-verse lyrics, and loosened blank verse, the chosen form answering the demands of the subject matter. Few, if any, of Carruth's contemporaries--or immediate predecessors or followers--have demonstrated such extensive mastery.

An overlooked poet
This collection contains several of Carruth's longer poems, including "The Sleeping Beauty." I picked up this collection to read this poem in my studies and I was impressed. Carruth's poetry is interesting and sparks the imagination with his subtle and genuine style.