Hayden Carruth

Poems deal with later life, a family member's struggle against cancer, lifetime friendships, and social concerns

Poems, 1991-1995

Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey

Collects poems by one hundred thirtyfive twentieth-century American poets, from Frost and Sandburg to Lawson and Sloman

American Poetry of the Twentieth Century

The Voice that is Great Within Us

(poems, 1969-1977)

Brothers, I Loved You All

Sam Hamill

This “portable Carruth,” edited and introduced by Sam Hamill, gathers the essential poems from a major American poet. Over his long and prolific career, Carruth has been one of the most rigorous and inventive technicians of a generation that will long be celebrated for its brilliance and variety. This volume presents lyrics and short and long narratives, as well as comic, meditative, and erotic poems, and reflections on the natural world. Ever engaged with radical politics, rural poverty, and the poet’s cultural responsibility, Carruth’s work is alive with a rare courage and clear-eyed conviction. Like the jazz he so loved, Carruth’s poetry ranges from the formal to the spontaneous, from local speech to righteous oratory, from sublime complexity to elegant understatement.

New & Selected Poems

Toward the Distant Islands

The balance, appreciation, and clear-eyed sympathy of Hayden Carruth’s 1975 essay on Robert Frost stands as a model for literary critics. His later essays on the blues, Richard Hugo, and Allen Ginsberg are similarly engaged, fair-minded, and human. Not every first-rate poet can write well about poetry, but Carruth was that rare writer who was brilliant both at making poems and discussing them. Adrienne Rich wrote that these essays “keep faith with poetry,” by which she meant that they refuse to simplify or objectify. There is much to be learned from Carruth’s prose as well as his poetry.

Selected Essays & Reviews

In his first collection of poems since he won the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, Carruth writes the threadbare memories of old age, and from the bleakest circumstances—such as the death of his daughter—reclaims dignity and beauty. With the spit and bop of a jazzman playing all the right notes, Carruth lives his music, finding the low tones of terrible loss, the highs of great friendships.

Doctor Jazz

Collected Shorter Poems presents hundreds of lyric, short narrative, comic, meditative, erotic, and nature poems that Hayden Carruth wrote over a forty-five year period. Noted for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, influenced by jazz and the blues, Carruth gives his poems a philosophical resonance. His explorations of rural poverty and hardship—sometimes grim, sometimes funny—are deeply informed by political radicalism and cultural responsibility.

Collected Shorter Poems, 1946–1991

Hayden Carruth’s poetry is distinguished by the indelible presence of passion, compassion, and radical philosophy. Collected Longer Poems gathers the poet’s choice of his narrative work and poems in sequence, including the meditative poems on the rural northeast that have made him the most accessible “regional” poet since Robert Frost. Carruth’s renowned technical genius is perfectly matched to his ear for spoken language and narrative structure. His observations of life are by turns caustic and hilarious.

Collected Longer Poems

This is an intimate portrait of one of the 20th century’s most influential publishers, as only a great poet can see him. It is impossible to imagine what American poetry in the twentieth century might look like without the magnanimity of the late James Laughlin, poet and publisher of New Directions. The list of authors first discovered, nurtured, and championed by Laughlin is breathtaking: Vladimir Nabokov, Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams, Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, and William Carlos Williams. The list goes on remarkably. Among Laughlin’s closest friends was poet Hayden Carruth, who served as author, editor, clerk, and typist for New Directions, and as “poetry doctor” for Laughlin himself. This utterly candid memoir chronicles the complex friendship between these two influential literary figures.

A Memoir of James Laughlin

Beside the Shadblow Tree

Hayden Carruth's From Snow and Rock, from Chaos - his first book since For You (1970) - contains a selection of his best short poems written between 1965 and 1972.

Poems 1965-1972

From Snow and Rock, from Chaos

More Selected Essays and Reviews (Poets on Poetry)

Effluences from the Sacred Caves

Jane Kenyon

Letters To Jane

Brooks Haxton

Stephen Dobyns

A final collection brings together works written near the end of the poet's life along with the concluding poems from each of his previous volumes.

Last Poems

Musings and revelations about poetry, jazz, and the rocky course of one poet's life

Suicides and Jazzers

Reveals the life of the poet chronicling his chronic depression, his love of jazz music, and his suicide attempt

Autobiographical Essays

Reluctantly

In thirteen poems, characters living in upstate New York discuss the death of a landlady, visit their old neighborhood, consider the meaning of their names, and share their observations of nature

Asphalt Georgics

Tell Me Again how the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands

This anthology of poetry presents works from influential poets of the twentieth century.

Hayden Carruth

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