The Ghost Soldiers: Poems - Softcover

Tate, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061756075 ISBN 13: 9780061756078

Publisher: Ecco, 2009

Synopsis

In this, his fifteenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate continues doing what he does best. His poems are evocative, provocative, funny, subtle, eccentric, occasionally disturbing, and wildly outrageous. Tate′s surrealist style strikes its own utterly new and original note in American poetry; as Charles Simic has observed, "To write a poem out of nothng at all is Tate′s genius. . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction. . . He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had."

Father′s Day

My daughter has lived overseas for a number

of years now. She married into royalty, and they

won′t let her communicate with any of her family or

friends. She lives on birdseed and a few sips

of water. She dreams of me constantly. Her husband,

the Prince, whips her when he catches her dreaming.

Fierce guard dogs won′t let her out of their sight.

I hired a detective, but he was killed trying to

rescue her. I have written hundreds of letters

to the State Department. They have written back

saying that they are aware of the situation. I

never saw her dance. I was always away at some

convention. I never saw her sing. I was always

working late. I called her My Princess, to make

up for my shortcomings, and she never forgave me.

Birdseed was her middle name.

About this title

About the Author:

James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry, including Worshipful Company of Fletchers, which won the National Book Award in 1994; Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award in 1991; and The Lost Pilot, which was selected by Dudley Fitts for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He has also published a novel and a collection of short stories, as well as edited The 1997 Best American Poetry Anthology. His honors include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, the Tanning Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Over the past several books, the prolific Pulitzer Prize winner Tate (Return to the City of White Donkeys) has been inching toward the invention of a new kind of American poem, a hybrid of prose poetry (though he's got loose, almost arbitrary line breaks), fable, surrealism and a sort of outsider folk poetry. These chatty, narrative works humorously treat all kinds of subjects, from civil unrest ( 'There are soldiers everywhere. Its' hard/ to tell which side they're on,' I said. 'They're against us./ Everyone's against us. Isn't that what you believe' ) to altruism (I said I didn't want any help from anyone, but, then,/ when no one offered to help, I was really hurt) and wildcats (I loved his quick, agile movements, never doubting himself,/ as most of us do). A dark undercurrent runs beneath them all, and war and politics—which tend to confuse the poems' speakers—are frequent subjects. It's rare that a poet so far into his career—this is Tate's 15th collection—comes up with something new; quietly, Tate has found a fresh way of telling some of America's stories. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0061756075
• ISBN 13: 9780061756078
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240