Return to the City of White Donkeys: Poems

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 into one 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 few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had."

"Tate's influence on younger American poets (both as writer and mentor) stands near its apex, but this 14th book of his own poems presents the genial master at less than his best. Tate won the Yale Younger Poets prize for his strong, sad, lyrical debut, The Lost Pilot, but earned fame in the 1970s and '80s for bitter humor and homey pomo pastiche, set in a prosey free verse where the linebreaks can seem as arbitrary as the situations in which his speaker finds himself. The poems reflect jaded amusement, hope and occasional despair as the poet makes his way through a dangerous world, 'contemplating the/ life of the postmodern buffalo' or 'the public aspect of breast exposure,' pursuing the resurrection of Eleanor Roosevelt, 'holding this really exemplary radish,' or watching 'masked men with titanium pincers slide/ silently through the blackened halls.' With few formal challenges, but with plenty of jokes, the poems can recall the comedian Steven Wright, or the pages McSweeney's. If their sheer quantity can make them seem formulaic, Tate's twisted scenarios provoke and amuse as much as they ever did; though they may tire longtime followers, these poems could find new admirers among people who don't often read poets at all." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943. He is the author ofMemoir of the Hawk (2001); Shroud of the Gnome(1997); Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994), which won the National Book Award; Selected Poems (1991), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award for Poetry; Distance from Loved Ones (1990); Reckoner (1986); Constant Defender (1983); Riven Doggeries (1979); Viper Jazz (1976); Absences (1972); Hints to Pilgrims (1971); The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970); and The Lost Pilot (1967), which was selected by Dudley Fitts for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He is also the author of three books of prose, including a collection of stories, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee, and the editor of The Best American Poetry 1997. His many honors include the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.