David Tucker has been writing Late for Work throughout his twenty-eight-year career at top city newspapers. In his poems he follows reporters hustling for stories and captures the beauty of everyday life, lived between breaking headlines.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Newspaperman and poet Tucker has a gift for celebrating the humble bliss of stillness and quiet without intimations of spiritual cachet or self-importance. Instead, he expresses a low-key joy in peacefulness, the act of lingering, and the pleasure of not doing. He writes subtly rebellious poems about days on which nothing obvious happens, the revelations of laziness, and the overlooked and poignant beauty of dust motes in a sunbeam, crows wheeling, and an apple as it falls drunkenly from the tree. Tucker portrays with affection local loafers and bench sitters, and remembers the amplitude and strictures of a Tennessee past. Deceptive in their sturdy plainness, these brick-and-mortar poems are inlaid with patterns as elegant as the swoop of swallows, and images as startling and right as a cat's bowl of milk shimmering as its "moon god." Chosen by Philip Levine as the winner of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize, Tucker's collection, like a whispered confidence, draws the reader near, and tenderly rewards close attention. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"A fine and gentle invocation of humanity against too much urgency....Wonderful work!" --Tom Ashbrook, National Public Radio
"Here is cleverness and delight in language that do what only the best poems do." --Mark Bowden, journalist & author of Black Hawk Down
"[Tucker] keeps his eye focused, with tempered joy and genuine happiness, on how work also enlarges life....Terrific." --Andrew Hudgins
"Here is cleverness and delight in language that do what only the best poems do." --Mark Bowden, journalist & author of Black Hawk Down
"[Tucker] keeps his eye focused, with tempered joy and genuine happiness, on how work also enlarges life....Terrific." --Andrew Hudgins
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
When Terry Gross interviewed David Tucker on Fresh Air, my ears pricked right up. So straightforward, so down to earth. He draws on his work -- his real work as an assistant managing editor for the NJ Star-Ledger -- and write poetry as affecting and plainspoken as Auden, Frost, or James Agee in "Knoxville: Summer of 1915." I used to be afraid of writing poetry that revealed, in any way, the culture and time in which it was written and I despised such poetry as trivial and pointless. Now, I am completely intoxicated by it. Here is another poet whose work I hope they dig up 1,000 years from now and say, "Oh. So that's what it was like." Read this. Meet his mother or his father or his grandfather, sit with him on his day off or when he's watching crows or listening to the clothes dryer, read his first person account of the day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts operations of God himself.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful
By Joan Mazza
Format:Paperback
What an upbeat and insightful collection! It's a pleasure to read the poetry of a man in love with life, immersed in the present, attentive to detail and the nuances of language.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Ruth G.
Format:Paperback
I come back to this book every so often...it's the NJ I live in and the Tennessee I spend time in and real and simple and yet it elevates the real to the lyrical. Funny, true, beautiful, simple. Perfect sometimes. So worth reading, buying.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Prize-winning journalist-poet David Tucker gives us news of such things as putting things off,a snowbound airport,hectic glimpses of the newsroom or a voice-mail from what's-his-face.He's an economical writer,who finds the quintessentially perfect words for life's sadness as well as its beauty.His skill at making quiet moments seem like ours, almost made me think I could write poetry too.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By D. Sahmedini
Format:Paperback
This book will make you stop in your tracts. The language is simple, straightforward, yet profound. You can just spend an hour on each poem, they are that good. I am not a huge poetry fan, but I bought this one after my local paper recommended it, buy it and just listen.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By H. Smith
Format:Paperback
Im so glad I stumbled upon this book in a bookstore. Ive been dry lately on finding inspiring work but, this book put a smile back on my face. get it.
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