From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Over the past several books, the prolific Pulitzer Prize winner Tate (
Return to the City of White Donkeys) has been inching toward the invention of a new kind of American poem, a hybrid of prose poetry (though he's got loose, almost arbitrary line breaks), fable, surrealism and a sort of outsider folk poetry. These chatty, narrative works humorously treat all kinds of subjects, from civil unrest ( 'There are soldiers everywhere. Its' hard/ to tell which side they're on,' I said. 'They're against us./ Everyone's against us. Isn't that what you believe' ) to altruism (I said I didn't want any help from anyone, but, then,/ when no one offered to help, I was really hurt) and wildcats (I loved his quick, agile movements, never doubting himself,/ as most of us do). A dark undercurrent runs beneath them all, and war and politics—which tend to confuse the poems' speakers—are frequent subjects. It's rare that a poet so far into his career—this is Tate's 15th collection—comes up with something new; quietly, Tate has found a fresh way of telling some of America's stories.
(Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
What a mood James Tate is in these days. In his newest collection, this veteran poet seems to be suffering from a kind of literary post-traumatic stress disorder—a reaction, perhaps, to what he sees as the Orwellian state of Iraq War–era America—which manifests itself in cynicism so profound that it borders on nihilism. The poems share a bottomless disillusionment that comes from a sense that nothing makes sense, nothing matters, nothing can be done. Human connection seems impossible in poems full of meetings between acquaintances who might as well be strangers and who engage, with often comically bizarre effect, in conversation dominated by non sequiturs. (In “Waylon’s Woman,” a man admires a female friend but from a respectful distance, since she’s in love with a rooster.) Occasionally, the fog lifts, as in “Strictly Forbidden,” when a professional eavesdropper throws in the towel. “I don’t really care anymore,” he tells his alarmed supervisor. “I do the best I can, but I’m only human. I mean, I’m still human.” So there’s a ray of hope after all. --Kevin Nance
