Poetry Of The Absurd. In Little Poem With Argyle Socks, He Writes: Behind Every Great Man / There Sits A Rat. / And Behind Every Great Rat, / There's A Flea. / Besides The Flea There Is An Encyclopedia. / Every Now And Then The Flea Sneezes, Looks Up, / And Flies Into Action, Reorganizing History. / The Rat Says, God, I Hate Irony. / To Which The Great Man Replies, / Now Now Now, Darling, Drink Your Tea. Go, Youth -- What A Patient Does -- Autosuggestion: Uss North Carolina -- A Missed Opportunity -- 50 Views Of Tokyo -- What The City Was Like -- The Great Root System -- Loyalty -- Little Poem With Argyle Socks -- A Manual Of Enlargement -- Head Of A White Woman Winking -- Like A Scarf -- More Later, Less The Same -- How The Pope Is Chosen -- Becoming A Scout -- Annual Report -- Back To Nature -- The Wrong Way Home -- The Nitrogen Cycle -- The Early Years -- A New Beginning -- The Documentary We Were Making -- A Glowworm, A Lemur, And Some Women -- I Got Blindsided -- The New Chinese Fiction -- Abandoned Conceptions -- We Go To A Fire -- Desire -- Where Were You? -- Porch Theory -- From An Island -- The Parade And After The Parade -- An Eland, In Retirement -- Jim Left The Pet Cemetery With A Feeling Of Disgust -- The New Work -- We Love The Venerable House -- In My Own Backyard -- The Morning News -- Summer, Maine Coast -- Color In The Garden -- Inspiration -- Worshipful Company Of Fletchers -- Happy As The Day Is Long. James Tate.

Tate, James, 1943-2015

United States, United States of America

1st ed, Hopewell, N.J, c1994

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. The book covers a vast range of images; a child's shoe in the road, a word on the kitchen counter "next to the pitcher of cream/with its blue cornflowers bent," "a city whose citizens...did not live in any one place/but roamed the boulevards and alleyways/picking up gumwrapppers and setting them down again," a woman leading a bumblebee "as big as a Saint Bernard," a retired eland that "watches television from early morning until late at night." But each image can exist only in the context of its poem, where it becomes something greater, where it underlines - together with other equally brilliant and eccentric images - all that is elusive about human experience.

These new poems ... deliver the typical Tate-esque trope de grace to all sanctimonious poses and stodgy cogitation, all verdigris-encrusted mental statuary.--Carolyne Wright, Harvard Review. Winner of the 1994 National Book Award

2023-06-28