Product Description

Hayden Carruth, one of the most acclaimed poets of our age, lives his music -- finding the perfect low tones of terrible loss and high riffs of family and friendship.

"Carruth keeps getting better." -- The New Yorker

"Carruth's new poems are, essentially, songs of praise and celebrations of beauty; for all the real anguish and pain they record, they remain enactments of a fundamental attitude of faith and wonder." -- Times Literary Supplement (London)

"The elegiac gravity of 'Dearest M -- ,' on a daughter's death, refuses to release us until its final syllable." -- Library Journal (starred review)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1857771 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 150 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Octogenarian poet Carruth, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, and whose anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us remains a stalwart of 20th-century American modernism, is a familiar and respected figure on the lit scene, having overcome decades of psychological and physical illnesses to find himself still productive in old age. His Collected Shorter Poems (which will be reissued by Copper Canyon on the occasion of this new collection's appearance) and Collected Longer Poems are highly individual, cranky, even cussed, but always with a unique voice, sometimes a highly moving one, and occasionally quite funny. This new collection's emotional center is a 15-page-long poem in memory of the poet's daughter Martha, who died of cancer in her 40s. Other sections, like "Afterlife," "Basho" and "Faxes" have Carruth speaking plainly to a variety of interlocutors, in lines of varying lengths. "While Reading Basho," with its modern-style haiku, has some of the jauntiness of Carruth at his crustiest: "Basho, you made/ a living writing haiku?/ Wow ! Way to go, man." Asian writers seem to be of particular significance, as in "The Afterlife: Remembering Fucking," which concludes: "Great enigma, I not knowing what orgasm/ Felt like to you and you not knowing what/ Orgasm felt like for me the impenetrable/ Mystery. `Everything is possible,' Chuang-tzu/ Said, `If one only gives oneself to another.'" It's not at all clear who will be interested in remembering such encounters with the poet, but as it is, the very appearance of another book will please this prolific writer's many fans. Others unfamiliar with his verse would do better starting off with earlier and more consistent work.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"A memorious old man" approaching his ninth decade, Carruth continues to question authority, fate, circumstance, and our assumptions about aging. This collection of new poems spans a multitude of subjects and emotions in a voice softened by promise and hardened by disappointment sometimes within the same sentence: "One hoped the brilliant sunset of July/ In all its layered upsurge, orange and rose,/ Might fade more slowly from the sky/ And bring the day to close/ On something more concordant than this cry/ In massive, horrifying dark." Like the late Philip Larkin, Carruth's sense of "the unending end" is unyielding, and when he glumly notes that "for the things/ life didn't give us/ we have no/ compensation. None" we must admire his grizzled, all-too-pointed wit. But Carruth knows joy, too, in nature, in jazz (Sidney Bechet's music is "an Iliad to my ears"), and in physical love. His sense of humor surfaces repeatedly, and if the domestic marginalia of sequences like "Faxes to William" seem lighter than air, the elegiac gravity of "Dearest M ," on a daughter's death, refuses to release us until its final syllable. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
"The magnitudes / always defeat me," Carruth writes in this book of poetry, his thirty-first. "But what / abundance! What plenitude!" An elegy for his daughter grounds the collection, along with powerful poems on the hardships of contemporary rural life, and yet Carruth remains great fun to read. He is as at home with the prison riots of Attica as he is with Odysseus or Jelly Roll Morton—he is the consummate poet of easeful learning and well-tuned orneriness. Perhaps this is why, at eighty, Carruth—unlike his great master, Frost—keeps getting better.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker