Selected Poems

Tate James

"The Selected Poems", James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from "The Lost Pilot" which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection "Reckoner". He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate has been described as a surrealist. If that is what he is, his surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by his unillusioned subversion and candour. This book, John Ashbery says, "allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting".

About the Author

James Tate grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author several books of poems and teaches at the University of Massachusetts. He lives in Amherst.

Reviews

"...he has the rare ability to be very, very funny on the page..." – New York Times Book Review

"American poetry, in desperate need of real vision, is being finally rewarded with the genuine article" – Jorie Graham

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