The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990 - 2010

by James Tate

Overview

“Tate’s poems are meditative, introverted, self-reliant, funny, alarming, strange, difficult, intelligent, and beautifully crafted.”
—New York Times
                                 
The Eternal Ones of the Dream is a breathtaking collection of poems from the last two decades of work of one of modern American poetry’s major artists, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate. Tate’s remarkable work—filled with dark wit, dry humor, and deceptive simplicity—is considered among the most accessible poetry written in the last several decades, and it has inspired acclaimed poet W.S. Merwin to write, “Mr. Tate’s gift is such that many of [his] poems move me at least to plain envy of what he can do.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062101860
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/27/2012
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

James Tate's poems have been awarded the National Book Award, the Pulitzer

Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Yale

Younger Poets Award, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and

have been translated across the globe. Tate was a member of the American

Academy of Arts and Letters; his many collections include The Lost Pilot, The

Oblivion Ha-Ha, Absences, Distance from Loved Ones, Worshipful Company

of Fletchers, and The Ghost Soldiers. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he made his

home in Pelham, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

Tate is now in the late period of a long and influential career in poetry. His early style, unfurled in books like The Lost Pilot and Viper Jazz, combined a zany, surreal sense of humor with a sad, middle-American loneliness. It was a guiding light, along with Ashbery’s work from the 1950s–1970s, for a huge chunk of American poetry over the past 40 years. Represented here, however, is Tate’s late style, a subtle reinvention of his own devising, though influenced, it would seem, by the prose poems of Russell Edson. Wily fables, tall tales, in which an unwitting protagonist stumbles into one ridiculous situation after another, are peopled by a rotating cast of humorous foils. In “Long-Term Memory,” a man is feeding pigeons in a park when another man “scrutinized my/ face right up close. ‘There’s a statue of you/ over there,’ he said. ‘You should be dead. What/ did you do to deserve a statue?’” Portrayals of the military make as little sense as, say, the military: “After the burial/ we returned to our units/ and assumed our poses./ Our posture was the new posture/ and not the old posture.” A desk drawer is cleaned out to reveal “a paper bag with/ a baloney sandwich in it that must have been three years old. I found/ some notecards with hieroglyphics carefully written on them.” From these odd setups come odder conclusions. It’s hard to say whether this is poetry or prose, funny or sad, important or frivolous. Whatever it is, though, it’s good reading. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly