Memoir of the Hawk [Hardcover]

James Tate (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2001

James Tate's new book, Memoir of the Hawk, creates a world populated by hundreds of characters, believable and strange, tugged at the edges by the unexpected. In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising pleasures:...lost in the interstellar space between teacups in the cupboard, found in the beak of a downy woodpecker, the lovers staring into the void and then jumping over it, flying into their beautiful tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Patently fictional encounters with pets and wild animals, aliens, witches and the like stream from the perspective of a childlike, small-town American speaker steeped in the marvelous (or at least the absurd). It's a familiar mode for Tate's readers, but if anything this 13th collection of page-or-so lyrics is less dense, as if the entirety is designed to be read "in one night," as he suggests in "Duel To The Death." Unfortunately, Tate's characteristic winking obliquities have become immediately transparent ("the old/ vice versa principle working overtime/ to keep us interested, or at least/ confused"), making the poems' themes and social dynamics nearly indistinguishable, and their resolutions, whether happy or sad, often premature and unconvincing. Tate's poetry may still be driven by the psychic violence of alienation, but the work is much more comfortable with this alienation than ever, often settling for thin indictments of faux-repressive social mores: "A mishap on the set today. Julie was/ to kiss Don on the lips, but she missed and/ fell on her face....And the time she set the stage curtains on/ fire when lighting her cigarette, that was/ theatre. The play will go on, but Don must/ go. I'm tired of his complaints." At his best, though, Tate's neo-Beckettian vision of the poet as a stoical, solitary tramp, persistent in his folly, who avoids the workaday world like the plague, suggests still-disruptive potentials of the absurd. (On sale: June 5)Forecast: Tate was recently named to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American poets, and his Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994) won the National Book Award. Tate's type-casting as "easier Ashbery" is not likely to change with this volume, and most fans won't mind.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

James Tate is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Worshipful Company of Fletchers, which won the National Book Award, and Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award. In 1995 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Prize by the Academy of American Poets. James Tate teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1st edition (June 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066210178
• ISBN-13: 978-0066210179
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,530,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enthralling. Fresh. Unique. Pulitzer-worthy., April 17, 2007

By 

Jonathan Stephens "Jonathan Stephens" (Huntington Beach, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memoir of the Hawk: Poems (Paperback)

I'm a not usually a big poetry guy, but this collection of poems enthralled me. So fresh. So unique. For once I agree that a work should have won the Pulitzer, as this one did. Tate combines his fresh images together into poems that surprise you, shock you, inspire you, and ultimately keep you flipping the pages. They're great to be read aloud. Few, if any, rhymes and metered sections, his poems tell short, imagistic tales of proverbial wisdom.

Why do the doves fly out of the priests eyes?
Is the old woman really going to bite your fingers?
Are the toads actually talking?
Why would a mother and son pretend they are Adam and Eve?
Why did they name their flower shop Murder, Inc.?

If you're looking for Walt Whitman, go somewhere else, but if you're in the mood for a more comical William Carlos Williams, a more formal E.E. Cummings, a cleaner Bukowski, then James Tate just might be your guy.

-- Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling/Absurd, January 30, 2003

By 

Sherri Stewart (South Bend, IN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Memoir of the Hawk: Poems (Paperback)

I was drawn to this having read Tate's "Worshipful Company of Fletchers" and his "Selected Poems". The former I loved, but the later felt more subdued. Here in "The Memoir of the Hawk" we have another set of poems which truly give the reader joy. I found myself rereading nearly every poem to enjoy the images and unexpected events. I laughed out loud at many of these poems, good solid laughter from the strangeness of the world of the poem and at times from straight comedy.

Not a book for those more aligned to SERIOUS and/or FORMAL poetry. The best comparison I can make is that much of Tate's ideas and images are like the best of "They Might Be Giants" (the band)...lyrical, musical, absurd and at the same time compelling.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Still The Master, August 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Memoir of the Hawk (Hardcover)

I had the idea to write an impassioned defense of this book, but it is too hot, I don't have the energy. And really, it was the wrong idea anyways -- this book doesn't need an impassioned, intellectual defense.

It is a little too long. There are poems in it that are weak and that stand out against the others. But there are poems in this book that are heartbreaking, astonishing, and beautiful. James Tate can still move through a poem nimbly, artfully, and darkly in a way that no one else can. I began reading this book tainted by my contemporaries' cynicism, and the poems rocketed up through the dense cloud of all that and shone brightly.

Not all of them. Of course.

But James Tate, for all his occasional doddering steps, continues to take great leaps across the landscape of the imagination and the world.