Books by James Tate

Clear and insightful poetry on our relationship to the given world.

A breathtaking collection of work from 1990 to 2010 by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate James Tate's poems are evocative, provocative, funny, subtle, eccentric, occasionally disturbing, and wildly outrageous. His surrealist style strikes its own utterly new and original note in American poetry, transforming our everyday world into sublime burlesque?a world where women give birth to wolves, wild babies are found in gardens, and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day. Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and deeply particular.The Eternal Ones of the Dream features Tate's work from the last two decades, selected from seven books of poetry. The poems span from 1990's Distance from Loved Ones to 2009's The Ghost Soldiers, showcasing the impressive breadth of talent. As W. S. Merwin said of Tate, "Mr. Tate's gift is such that many of [his] poems move me at least to plain envy of what he can do."

The seventeenth book of verse from one of Americas finest and most acclaimed contemporary poetswinner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.Capturing his inimitable voiceprovocative, amusing, understated, and riotous all at oncethe poems in Dome of the Hidden Pavilion demonstrate James Tate at his finest. Innovative and fresh, they range in subject from a talking blob to a sobering reminiscence of a war and its aftereffects.Though they are diverse in scope, a theme of dialogue and communicationand often miscommunicationlinks these poems. Accessible yet subtly surrealist, filled with dark wit, dry humor, and a deceptive simplicity, Dome of the Hidden Pavilion confirms Tates continuing relevance as one of the most celebrated American poets of the modern age.

Memoir of the Hawk creates a world populated by hundreds of characters, believable and strange, tugged at the edges by the unexpected. In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising pleasures: ... lost in the interstellar space between teacups in the cupboard, found in the beak of a downy woodpecker, the lovers staring into the void and then jumping over it, flying into their beautiful tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.

In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate continues exploring his own peculiar brand of poetry, transforming our everyday world, a world where women give birth to wolves, wild babies are found in gardens, and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day. Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar, but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and eccentric.Yet, as Charles Simic observed in the New York Review of Books, "With all his reliance on chance, Tate has a serious purpose. He's searching for a new way to write a lyric poem." He continues, "To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. For him, the poem is something one did not know was there until it was written down. . . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction. . . . Tate is not worried about leaving us a little dazed. . . . He succeeds in ways for which there are a few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had."

A selection of the 75 best American poems of 1997 chosen by poet James Tate. The verse and prose poems are by both established figures such as Jorie Graham, Donald Hall and John Ashberry, and emerging poets such as Billy Collins and Linda Gregerson.