Work, for the Night is Coming [Paperback]

Jared Carter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 1995

" Work, for the Night is coming is a beautiful, enriching book. --Henry Taylor Magill's Literary Annual

Editorial Reviews

Review

"From beginning to end, this volume has the quiet passion of conviction, the voice of a poet who knows exactly what he wants to say and how to say it... Behind the range of styles and approaches, one recognizes a single honest and contemporary voice." These are loving poems, delivered in a quiet, authoritative voice; the reader slips into their flow..." ----Dana Gioia, Poetry

These are loving poems, delivered in a quiet, authoritative voice; the reader slips into their flow and partakes of a communion... [This] is a remarkable achievement." ----Bruce Bennett, New York Times Book Review

Carter's is a poetry of a resolute middle distance, firmly of this world: between the dust under the earth and the dust of space there exists the place that the poem can illumine." ----Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books

About the Author

"Jared Carter's first collection of poems, Work, for the Night is Coming , won the Walt Whitman Award."

Product Details

• Paperback: 47 pages
• Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center; 1st CSU Poetry Center ed edition (October 3, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880834200
• ISBN-13: 978-1880834206
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,975,500 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revisiting Mississinewa County, September 7, 2006

By 

Anna Evans (Hainesport, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Work, for the Night is Coming (Paperback)

I was fascinated by the poems in this book for various reasons. While they are predominantly narrative, and hugely rooted in place (most are clearly situated in the fictional Indiana county of Mississinewa, even the more lyrical poems such as "Geodes" and "Meditation" sharing that geography) they are not self-consciously formal at all. It would appear that it is natural to Mr. Carter to write in loose iambic rhythms--most lines could be fitted to tetrameter or pentameter, but it is equally clearly not a structure he has forced onto the poems. I often finished reading a poem with an almost wistful belief that it WAS in blank verse, which I overturned only by going back and scanning enough lines to demonstrate the fallacy. There is only one deliberately formal poem in here "The Measuring" and even that has a rhyme pattern which varies between stanzas. Nevertheless Mr. Carter undoubtedly occupies a position close to formal verse in all these poems, many of which are in set stanzas and demonstrate lines of equal lengths. Another source of interest for me was the clear intention of these poems to document a place at a specific time, the Indiana of his childhood and earlier. This traditional function of poetry is often now overlooked and poetry is the poorer for it. As a non-American, I learned snippets of history, nature and folklore from these poems, such as "Tintypes", "Ginseng" and "The Strawman." Yet Mr. Carter avoids being prosey, either because of the richness of his language or the consistency of his rhythms. A great read!