James Tate

An award-winning gathering of exquisite poems by a celebrated poet. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1992) Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1992) 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 candor.

Selected Poems

The stunning, startling collection that is also the last work from a major poet A woman named Mildred starts laying eggs after feathers from wild poultry begin coming down the chimney. A man becomes friends with a bank robber who abducts him and eventually rues his captor’s death. A baby is born transparent. James Tate’s work, filled with unexpected turns and deadpan exaggeration, “fanciful and grave, mundane and transcendent,” (New York Times) has been among the most defining and significant of our time. In his last collection before his death in 2015, Tate’s dark yet whimsical humor, his emotional acuity, and his keen ear for the absurd are on full display in prose poems that finely constructed and lyrical, surrealistic and provocative. With The Government Lake, James Tate reminds us why he is one of the great poets of our age and one of the true masters of the form.

Last Poems

The Government Lake

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."

Selected Poems 1990 - 2010

The Eternal Ones of the Dream

Speakers in James Tate's poems are and are not like those we know: a man's meditation on gardening renders him witless; another man traps theories and then lets them loose in a city park; a nun confides that "it was her / cowboy pride that got her through"; a gnome's friend inhabits a world where "a great eschatological ferment is at work. "Shroud of the Gnome" is a bravura performance in Tate's signature style: playful, wicked, deliriously sober, charming, and dazzling. Here, once again, one of America's most masterful poets celebrates the inexplicable in his own strange tongue.

Shroud Of The Gnome

A new collection of poems by the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author offers insight into his use of meditative and introverted language.

Poems

The Ghost Soldiers

Masterfully drawing on a variety of voices and characters, James Tate joyfully offers his first book since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his "Selected Poems."

Worshipful Company of Fletchers

The seventeenth book of verse from one of America’s finest and most acclaimed contemporary poets—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Capturing his inimitable voice—provocative, amusing, understated, and riotous all at once—the 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 communication—and often miscommunication—links these poems. Accessible yet subtly surrealist, filled with dark wit, dry humor, and a deceptive simplicity, Dome of the Hidden Pavilion confirms Tate’s continuing relevance as one of the most celebrated American poets of the modern age.

New Poems

Dome of the Hidden Pavilion

The stunning, startling collection that is also the last work from a major poet A woman named Mildred starts laying eggs after feathers from wild poultry begin coming down the chimney. A man becomes friends with a bank robber who abducts him and eventually rues his captor's death. A baby is born transparent. James Tate's work, filled with unexpected turns and deadpan exaggeration, "fanciful and grave, mundane and transcendent," (New York Times) has been among the most defining and significant of our time. In his last collection before his death in 2015, Tate's dark yet whimsical humor, his emotional acuity, and his keen ear for the absurd are on full display in prose poems that finely constructed and lyrical, surrealistic and provocative. With The Government Lake, James Tate reminds us why he is one of the great poets of our age and one of the true masters of the form.

An essential collection of James Tate's extraordinary poems that will captivate today's readers, with an introduction by Terrance Hayes Celebrating James Tate's work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, "No, you can't do that," Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the "poet of possibilities," and this collection records forays into possibilities for American poetry's future. With a new introduction by Terrance Hayes, it is sure to give readers, new and old, a lasting collection of favorites to be treasured for years to come.

The Essential James Tate

Hell, I Love Everybody

The Oblivion Ha-Ha

Viper Jazz

Hints to Pilgrims

A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and numerous other honors includes in his latest collection the poem, "The Raven Speaks," in which an interaction with a bird forces the writer to evaluate his responsibility in the world. By the author of Memoir of the Hawk andWorshipful Company of Fletchers. 15,000 first printing.

Return to the City of White Donkeys

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, The Best American Poetry is the one indispensable volume for readers eager to follow what's new in poetry today. Sales continue to grow and plaudits keep coming in for this "high-voltage testament to the vitality of American poetry" (Booklist). Selected by prizewinning guest editor James Tate, the seventy-five best poems of the year were chosen from more than three dozen magazines and range from the comic to the cosmic, from the contemplative to the sublime. In addition to showcasing our leading bards -- such as John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, and Mark Strand -- the collection marks an auspicious debut for eye-opening younger poets. With comments from the poets themselves offering insights into their work, The Best American Poetry 1997 delivers the startling and imaginative writing that more and more people have come to expect from this prestigious series.

The Best American Poetry 1997

Pulitzer Prize winner James Tate's only collection of short fiction available for the first time in paperback.

Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee

The Lost Pilot

An essential collection of James Tate’s extraordinary poems that will captivate today’s readers, with a foreword by Terrance Hayes Celebrating James Tate’s work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, “No, you can’t do that,” Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the “poet of possibilities,” and this collection records forays into possibilities for American poetry’s future. With a foreword by Terrance Hayes, it is sure to give readers new and old a lasting collection of favorites.

James Tate

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