Last Poems - Softcover

Carruth, Hayden

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556593813 ISBN 13: 9781556593819

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2012

Synopsis

Praise for Hayden Carruth:

"Something Hayden Carruth does as well as any writer is to treat the reader as a friend, and to provide, through his poetry, hours of good company."—The New York Times Book Review

"One of the lasting literary signatures of our time."—Library Journal, starred review

"Carruth, like Whitman, like Chaucer, is large—he contains multitudes. Dip into his work anywhere, and there is life—and death—as stirringly felt and cogitated as in some vast, Tolstoyan novel."—Booklist, starred review

Hayden Carruth's Last Poems is a triumph—a morally engaged, tender, and fearless volume that combines the last poems of his life with the concluding poems from each of his previous volumes. Introduced by Stephen Dobyns, Last Poems is a moving tribute to a towering and beloved figure in American poetry.

From "Father's Day":

I don't know what fathers are
Supposed to do, although the calendar says
This is "Father's Day." But the day is gloomy
And not at all conducive to visiting or
Celebrating. I know the best thing fathers in
Their prime can do is to make daughters and
More daughters; we can never have enough.
Daughters are our best protection against

Loneliness and the absurd atrocities of
Foreign policy . . .

Hayden Carruth (1921–2008) lived for many years in northern Vermont, then moved to upstate New York, where he taught at Syracuse University. He won the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, and his Collected Shorter Poems received the National Book Critics Circle Award.

About this title

About the Author:

Hayden Carruth: Hayden Carruth (1921 2008) lived for many years in northern Vermont, then moved to upstate New York, where he taught in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. He published dozens of books of poetry, a novel, four books of criticism, and two anthologies. Carruth won the 1996 National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, and his Collected Shorter Poems: 1946-1991 received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He served as the editor of Poetry, poetry editor of Harper's, and for twenty-five years an advisory editor of The Hudson Review. The Bollingen, Guggenheim, and Lannan Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, awarded fellowships to Carruth, and he earned the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Vermont Governor's Medal, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Whiting Award, and the Ruth Lily Prize.

Stephen Dobyns: Stephen Dobyns was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1941. He graduated from Wayne State University and has an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Dobyns has published ten books of poetry and twenty-one novels, including the popular Saratoga” crime novels. Dobyns has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News and has taught at the University of Iowa, Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College, Syracuse University, and Boston University. Among his many honors and awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Stephen Dobyns lives in Rhode Island with his wife and three children.

From Booklist:

Despite clinical depression and severe agoraphobia, Carruth (1921–2008) lived not just through but in colloquy with his times. Emerging glad to be alive from an attempted-suicide-induced coma, he made his last two decades almost as productive as the three that preceded them. Still, between Toward the Distant Islands (2006) and his passing, he didn’t write enough poems to fill this big a book. Besides eulogistic essays by the poets Brooks Haxton and Stephen Dobyns, who knew him personally, the final poems from each of 26 previous books fill out the volume. The older poems, most not among those Sam Hamill selected to expand Toward the Distant Islands into a fine introduction to Carruth at his best, attest his thematic consistency as well as his range of styles and voices. The 34 pages of the literally last poems continue the gusto and the love, the anger and the philosophical acceptance, of his entire poetic corpus as they engage environmental crisis, idealistic delusion, appetitive delights, the miracle of friendship, and the hazards of age—indispensably, as ever. --Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1556593813
• ISBN 13: 9781556593819
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120