Selected Poems

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.

This is where I once saw James Tate playing in a
field. Letting go, I wondered why
he wandered where. It was
like eating sleeping bags and smoke
or living a phrase vaguely enough
to fool the leaving committee.

I wondered whether to say speech,
words, hickory in the mouth of soup.