Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems - Softcover

Carruth, Hayden

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556592361 ISBN 13: 9781556592362

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2006

Synopsis

“Carruth [is] one of the lasting literary signatures of our time.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Carruth...contains multitudes.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Carruth is a people’s poet... a virtuoso of form.”—The Nation

This “portable Carruth” gathers new poems with the essential works from a major American poet. Included are lyrics, short narratives, comic, meditative, and erotic poems that engage politics, music, rural poverty, and the cultural responsibility of artists. As Sam Hamill writes in the introduction:

“Carruth’s great body of work is a world... Like the jazz he so loves, his poetry ranges from the formal to the spontaneous, from local vernacular to righteous oratory, from beautiful complexity to elegant understatement.”

From “A Few Dilapidated Arias”

“Our crumbling civilization”–a phrase I have used often
during recent years, in letters to friends, even in
words for public print. And what does it mean? Can
a civilization crumble? At once appears the image
of an old slice of bread, stale and hard, green with mold,
shaped roughly like the northeastern United States, years
old or more, so hard and foul that even my pal Maxie,
the shepherd/husky cross who eats everything, won’t
touch it. And it is crumbling, turning literally into
crumbs, as the millions of infinitesimal internal connecting
fibers sever and loosen. The dust trickles and seeps away.

Hayden Carruth, a longtime resident of Vermont, currently lives in upstate New York, where he taught at Syracuse University. His many honors include the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

About this title

About the Author:

Hayden Carruth is the author of twenty-five books of poetry, a novel, four books of criticism, and two anthologies, and has held fellowships from the Bollingen, Guggenheim and Lannan foundations, as well as the NEA. His many awards include the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Award. Poet and translator Sam Hamill was the Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press and is currently the Director for Poets Against War.

From Booklist:

Deciding to present only complete poems and thus leave the contents of Carruth's Collected Longer Poems (1994) unplumbed, editor Hamill chose poems he hoped would spur readers on to the rest of the old master's writing. He certainly has corralled the preponderance of Carruth's most memorable work: poems of natural analysis, such as the radiant "The Loon on Forester's Pond"; his distinctive haiku, which replace Zen imagery with Western observation; his loose-blank-verse portraits of Vermont neighbors, especially "John Dryden"; that great, humanist antiwar poem, "On Being Asked to Write a Poem against the War in Vietnam"; "Essay," about the prevalence of dead and dying animals in modern American poetry; his long-lined philosophical poems, more Jeffersian than Whitmanian; his long, elegiac verse letter in memory of his daughter, "Dearest M--the First Day of Her Death." If such riches rather upstage the 35 pages of recent poems that follow them, well, how could they not? Anyway, Carruth's present crusty-but-lusty-old-geezer persona is far from unrewarding; don't miss the concluding "A Few Dilapidated Arias." Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1556592361
• ISBN 13: 9781556592362
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 150