Customer Reviews

Memoir of the Hawk

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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

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.

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.