Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
Harvey Shapiro's precise, understated lyrics have garnered praise in the US, the UK, and in Israel. His early poems, hailed by The Nation as "some of the best poems of our generation," were notable in part because they gave new form to Jewish immigrant experience. This collection presents the best work from Shapiro's early books, including the classic poems "Battle Report" on World War II and "National Cold Storage Company" on the death of John Kennedy, and a wealth of new poems, more sensual, but no less wry. Shapiro sees life itself as a state of exile, and writes of the spaces where "for a moment, the light holds."