Adrienne Rich has called Hayden Carruth "a part of our country's poetic treasure," and his other admirers include Galway Kinnell and Wendell Berry. A poet's poet, Carruth spins simple lines full of possible meanings, lines that stick in the reader's mind a long time. In "Particularity," for instance, Carruth writes of "this invisible / hereness where I am . . . the center / of mystery." Juxtaposing the mysterious with the tangible, Carruth is writing better than ever.


From Publishers Weekly
Carruth's latest collection revolves around a handful of familiar themes, all of which mingle and reconfigure throughout the poet's bittersweet, sometimes celebratory, occasionally rueful verse. Meditations on aging and love, nostalgia and guilt, contemporary politics and ancient history filter through much of this generally moving, uneven collection. Carruth's voice, always highly personal, is at its best when it mixes colloquial diction with an elegiac lyricism, as in his meditation on family history, "Flying into St. Louis": "For sixty-five years/ I've blamed my mother and father,/ I've climbed their trees and lopped off/ their branches, I've held/ their words in my mind like cudgels." At other times, however, the colloquial takes over and Carruth's verse becomes almost flat, as in "The Chain": "but I am a poet and you are too and so are all people/ except the monsters of this world/ out there planting/ mines in the mud and snow...." Despite its lesser offerings, the collection amply illustrates the openness and honesty with which Carruth addresses the world, the mixed compassion and outrage with which he responds to it and his continued productivity through a long, distinguished career. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Although Carruth here declares "Truth and Beauty/ were never the/ aims of proper poetry," there's plenty of both in this affecting volume. "When we say I/ miss you/ what we mean is "I'm/ filled with/ dread"; "Was it the way of your world, too, old master, that everyone had to be/ a villain in someone else's life?"; "This is the summer of war in Bosnia./ A few summers ago the war was somewhere else." Carruth drops such aphoristic insights with ease, and they hit like gentle little blows alerting us to what is at the heart of our experience. Every line is perfectly polished?not "crafted," which seems far too deliberate and forced a word for this easy-flowing poetry, but smoothed as if the words had been rolled around and around the tongue like good whiskey (and maybe even scrambled eggs). These poems, all written since the publication of Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 (LJ 4/1/92), which won the National Book Award, demonstrate that Carruth is still at the top of his form. Recommended for all poetry collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Carruth has often pondered the icon that is Robert Frost--the old poet wryly at odds with his country and thereby embodying its favorite self-image. Now he is old enough to be the Frost of his generation; he is just that when he spins a lilting, metrically exact, carefully rhymed "Homage to Edwin Muir" or fires off a slangy couplet on "The Last Poem in the World" : "Would I write it if I could? / Bet your glitzy ass I would." Yet he is very much of his generation--poets for whom Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams were more influential than Frost. He shares Pound's love of the classical Chinese masters, expressing it here in the sequence "A Summer with Tu Fu" ; another sequence he imagines as "Faxes to William," and there are echoes of Williams throughout this book. Other generational passions Carruth upholds are a fierce antiwar stance and existentialism; he often uses them for satiric seasoning. Finally, there is personal passion here, for "I am in love now, / In it totally all the time. / I have nothing else, I have forgotten my name . . ." Contemporary American poetry doesn't get any richer than this. Ray Olson

FROM THE PUBLISHER

There can be no doubt that Hayden Carruth is one of the pre-eminent American poets of the late twentieth century. In these poems written since publication of his Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, he speaks with intimate and urgent clarity of love late in life, and in heartrending poems addresses his daughter's struggle against cancer. In others he engages the loves, friendships, and social concerns of a lifetime. With passion and pathos and great good humor, in poems that could only be written by a mature poet at the height of his powers, Carruth achieves a nobility of vision that is rare in any age.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Carruth's latest collection revolves around a handful of familiar themes, all of which mingle and reconfigure throughout the poet's bittersweet, sometimes celebratory, occasionally rueful verse. Meditations on aging and love, nostalgia and guilt, contemporary politics and ancient history filter through much of this generally moving, uneven collection. Carruth's voice, always highly personal, is at its best when it mixes colloquial diction with an elegiac lyricism, as in his meditation on family history, "Flying into St. Louis": "For sixty-five years/ I've blamed my mother and father,/ I've climbed their trees and lopped off/ their branches, I've held/ their words in my mind like cudgels." At other times, however, the colloquial takes over and Carruth's verse becomes almost flat, as in "The Chain": "but I am a poet and you are too and so are all people/ except the monsters of this world/ out there planting/ mines in the mud and snow...." Despite its lesser offerings, the collection amply illustrates the openness and honesty with which Carruth addresses the world, the mixed compassion and outrage with which he responds to it and his continued productivity through a long, distinguished career. (Apr.)

Library Journal