Selected Poems

by James Tate

Book Overview

An award-winning gathering of exquisite poems by a celebrated poet.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1992)
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1992)

The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection Reckoner...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0819511927
• ISBN13: 9780819511928
• Release Date: March 1991
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Hyperbole just isn't enough

James Tate is THE visionary poet of our age and this is his most comprehensive collection to date. I have read, reread and read again every piece of Tate's writing I have been able to find since I was first exposed to Tate in a class I took with Rodney Jones (another excellent poet) nearly twenty years ago. Little can compare with: The Lost Pilot Coming Down Cleveland Avenue F@ck the Astronauts ...except the rest of this selected edition which often makes me forget even these masterpieces. I have gone through 3 copies of this selected edition as I took a copy of it with me everywhere for years.

Bukowski is Old and Tired and Sensationalistic

...and so to equate him w/ Tate is laughable. Your hexes won't work 'round these parts.

LOVE IT!!

I had never even heard of James Tate until we began to study him in my 20th century literature class in college. Now I don't know how I had ever not been aware of this man. I love this book and his overall work. Some of my favorite poems from this collection are: The Pet Deer, Goodtime Jesus, and Neighbors. I was also lucky enough to have Tate come to my college last night and read some of his poems that have not yet been published. They are somewhat different from the ones in this book, but are also wonderful. He is an amazingly funny and talented man in real life, and his poetry and craft is some of the most impressive that I have ever read. Definately check it out!!

A "omnibuzz" of the highest order

Tate's poems pack an extraordinary amount of activity into a very small space. Quite often a stanza, line or sometimes even a single word (e.g. "omnibuzz", a brilliant coinage from "The Life of Poetry", p. 174) can stand alone as a mini-poem on its own merits.A first read of a Tate poem can be annoying: the queasy feeling generated by a sequence of these (seemingly unrelated) mini-poems that have a disconcerting way of creating new layers of meaning by forming uneasy alliances with each other. Like Shakespeare before him (yes, he really is that good--you've got to read this guy!), Tate defies linguistic conventions in order raise, affirm, and expand human experience. Of course no one really knows if several centuries from now people will still be reading Tate, but I'd put money on it.

Tate is the best poet in America.

If you want to laugh, if you want to feel good about the human race, if you want something highly entertaining and intellectually satisfying to read (it is possible), then get this book. James Tate is just about the only poet ever who can write poetry that will actually make you physically laugh out loud. He is also the kind of poet that even people who hate poetry can like, just because he's so funny.