Product Description

"Carruth [is] one of the lasting literary signatures of our time."-Library Journal (starred review)

"Carruth...contains multitudes."-Booklist (starred review)

"Carruth is a people's poet... a virtuoso of form."-The Nation

This "portable Carruth" gathers new poems with the essential works from a major American poet. Included are lyrics, short narratives, comic, meditative, and erotic poems that engage politics, music, rural poverty, and the cultural responsibility of artists. As Sam Hamill writes in the introduction:

"Carruth's great body of work is a world... Like the jazz he so loves, his poetry ranges from the formal to the spontaneous, from local vernacular to righteous oratory, from beautiful complexity to elegant understatement."

From "A Few Dilapidated Arias"

"Our crumbling civilization"a phrase I have used often
during recent years, in letters to friends, even in
words for public print. And what does it mean? Can
a civilization crumble? At once appears the image
of an old slice of bread, stale and hard, green with mold,
shaped roughly like the northeastern United States, years
old or more, so hard and foul that even my pal Maxie,
the shepherd/husky cross who eats everything, won't
touch it. And it is crumbling, turning literally into
crumbs, as the millions of infinitesimal internal connecting
fibers sever and loosen. The dust trickles and seeps away.

Hayden Carruth, a longtime resident of Vermont, currently lives in upstate New York, where he taught at Syracuse University. His many honors include the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #721829 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 150 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Carruth's long and protean career includes his editing of The Voice That Is Great Within Us (1970), a still-standard anthology of American modernism; a high-profile stint as editor of Poetry magazine; and periods of rural seclusion. His 24 books encompass Frostian tales of farm life with New England eccentrics, compilations of haiku, long and unguarded poems of erotic devotion, autobiographical laments, and sensitive odes to jazz greats who understood that "Freedom and discipline occur/ only in ecstasy, all else// is shoveling out the muck." All sides of Carruth's oeuvre find a place in this welcome volume, dexterously compiled and introduced by Copper Canyon founder Sam Hamill. Where Carruth's individual books—even the strongest, such as the National Book Award–winning Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey (1996)—could become garrulous or repetitive, the selection here gives just enough of everything Carruth has learned, and he has learned a lot, especially about the ways and landscapes of New England. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Deciding to present only complete poems and thus leave the contents of Carruth's Collected Longer Poems (1994) unplumbed, editor Hamill chose poems he hoped would spur readers on to the rest of the old master's writing. He certainly has corralled the preponderance of Carruth's most memorable work: poems of natural analysis, such as the radiant "The Loon on Forester's Pond"; his distinctive haiku, which replace Zen imagery with Western observation; his loose-blank-verse portraits of Vermont neighbors, especially "John Dryden"; that great, humanist antiwar poem, "On Being Asked to Write a Poem against the War in Vietnam"; "Essay," about the prevalence of dead and dying animals in modern American poetry; his long-lined philosophical poems, more Jeffersian than Whitmanian; his long, elegiac verse letter in memory of his daughter, "Dearest M--the First Day of Her Death." If such riches rather upstage the 35 pages of recent poems that follow them, well, how could they not? Anyway, Carruth's present crusty-but-lusty-old-geezer persona is far from unrewarding; don't miss the concluding "A Few Dilapidated Arias." Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Hayden Carruth is the author of twenty-five books of poetry, a novel, four books of criticism, and two anthologies, and has held fellowships from the Bollingen, Guggenheim and Lannan foundations, as well as the NEA. His many awards include the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Award.

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Customer Reviews

Lyric Journey
Over many years of reading poetry, I've come to trust that any poetry book published by Copper Canyon Press is going to be an adventure. This collection , hand-picked by Press founder, Sam Hill, is no exception. I'd read enough of Hayden Carruth's work that I expected to be impressed, and I was.

The poems are selected from 12 previous collections (oh, if all of us poets could boast of so many published books!) with an addition of new poems at finish to keep the appetite whetted for more yet to come. It is interesting to watch for change and growth in the whole of Carruth's work, but that his talent was richly showing early on - the first batch selected dates back to 1959's "The Crow and the Heart" - is clear:

Of all disquiets sorrow is most serene.
Its interval of soft humility
Are lenient; they intrude on our obscene
Debasements and our fury like a plea
For wisdom...

Sorrow can shape us better than dismay.

Carruth understands the peaks and valleys of a man's life. As Sam Hill notes in his introduction, this is a poet who has struggled with angels and demons alike, finding both in himself. So his work reflects such struggles, and we swing upwards with him to whisper with angels, just as we slide into shadows with him, to weep and gnash teeth with dark demons. If a poet creates often from the grit inside him, as an oyster its pearl, then this poet proves the old axiom. We must know the demon to recognize the angel; we must strive to be angelic to fully understand the power of the demonic.

Carruth writes glorious love poems to his wife, filled with appetite and relish and adoration. He writes love poems to his daughter, lost too early to cancer. He writes love poems to the natural world around him, and to the characters that are found in humanity. He writes love poems to sorrow.

This is a poet who lives his life seam to seam, depth to height, and journals it into his lyric work. To share in his journey, this is a collection not to be missed.