Hayden Carruth Books

Do yourself a favor and pick up SCRAMBLED EGGS & WHISKEY -- and follow Hayden Carruth on a journey that masterfully and humbly moves from the most troubling, trying scenes from life to the most redeeming to the everyday and a whole, whole lot in between. Rhythmic, with obvious jazz sensibilities -- and with so much truth -- these poems get to the heart of the matter in ways that make you nod in agreement, laugh out loud or pause in grieving silence or certain solidarity. I am glad this is the book that introduced me to the huge body of Mr. Carruth's work.

David Lee has created for himself a solid niche in the literary scene: who else writes narrative poetry set in failure, ugly children, failed pig farms, greasy spoon restaurants .... and makes of it a wise observation of the universal human story? David Lee succeeds in this again and again.

In the case of Wayburne Pig we follow the fortunes of a small town cafe owner as he tries his hand at fancy-dancy pig farming ... while he neighbors raise sick sorry specimens of porcine ugly. Not the pretty side of small town ... but funny and informative about human nature.

David Lee may not appeal to everyone but his sense of oral language and of narrative give him a large audience.

Over many years of reading poetry, I've come to trust that any poetry book published by Copper Canyon Press is going to be an adventure. This collection , hand-picked by Press founder, Sam Hill, is no exception. I'd read enough of Hayden Carruth's work that I expected to be impressed, and I was.

The poems are selected from 12 previous collections (oh, if all of us poets could boast of so many published books!) with an addition of new poems at finish to keep the appetite whetted for more yet to come. It is interesting to watch for change and growth in the whole of Carruth's work, but that his talent was richly showing early on - the first batch selected dates back to 1959's "The Crow and the Heart" - is clear:

Of all disquiets sorrow is most serene.
Its interval of soft humility
Are lenient; they intrude on our obscene
Debasements and our fury like a plea
For wisdom...

Sorrow can shape us better than dismay.

Carruth understands the peaks and valleys of a man's life. As Sam Hill notes in his introduction, this is a poet who has struggled with angels and demons alike, finding both in himself. So his work reflects such struggles, and we swing upwards with him to whisper with angels, just as we slide into shadows with him, to weep and gnash teeth with dark demons. If a poet creates often from the grit inside him, as an oyster its pearl, then this poet proves the old axiom. We must know the demon to recognize the angel; we must strive to be angelic to fully understand the power of the demonic.

Carruth writes glorious love poems to his wife, filled with appetite and relish and adoration. He writes love poems to his daughter, lost too early to cancer. He writes love poems to the natural world around him, and to the characters that are found in humanity. He writes love poems to sorrow.

This is a poet who lives his life seam to seam, depth to height, and journals it into his lyric work. To share in his journey, this is a collection not to be missed.

The book was in excellent condition. It was sent on time. Outstanding.

I had a professor who used this book as a text. I was amazed at the depth and variety of poems and poets. I have used this book as a teacher also; it has many of those "everybody should read this" poems, as well as many other less known but wonderful titles. This is not a good book if you want commentary; it has poems and very short biographies only.

I recently purchased my second one of these, because I wore out the first one.

Even if you are untrained in poetry, as I am, (even if you are an engineer, as I am), you will find poems in here that will move you, thrill you, and make you sigh.

See how much language can transcend words. It opened my eyes.

I purchased this anthology because I love poetry and because I wanted a primer for some college American lit classes. I did get a good book out of the deal, but the latter expectation was never fully satisfied. If you're deciding whether to invest in a collection of "American Poetry of the Twentieth Century," there are some things to consider.

First, it should more aptly be subtitled, "American Poetry of the Mid-Twentieth Century." This anthology was compiled in 1970 with the bulk of its poetry originally published in the 1950s and 1960s (some from a couple decades before). As a result, it's top heavy with Frost, Cummings, W.C. Williams, and Roethke, et al. Naturally this isn't a tremendous problem, but it did make me wonder, for example, why Langston Hughes enjoys a scant two pages of recognition out of more than 700 pages of poetry! Another thing I found was that though this anthology earns points for sheer volume of work, tens of American lit classes later, I have yet to run across many of the authors. While I admittedly was not alive for any of the original publications, clearly most of the writing, however unfortunate, has not survived the passing of time. Thus a twenty-first century reader may find the collection rather dated.

All this said though, I still recommend this anthology because it is, simply, a collection of good poetry. Some of the more famous poems from some of the more famous authors are curiously absent, but again, this isn't a substitute for the Norton Anthology. In fact, I discovered a wealth of good twentieth century American writing that has escaped the Norton and Heath publishers. Most of the work is modern with a few pieces creeping into the shadow of post-modernity. Small biographies are provided for each author. An academic primer you won't end up with, but for all other purposes, this is a sound collection.

We venture to say that Hayden Carruth's anthology is necessary for understanding the trends, the vicissitudes, the heights and the depths of American poetry from the First World War to the time of the moonwalk (Neil Armstrong's moonwalk, not Michael Jackson's). A necessary book is not necessarily a perfect book, but there is something here for everyone.

We detect a slight preference for the "new" -- and often the radical -- in prosody and in politics. If we are looking for W H Auden in this book, we will not find him because he seems in the anthologist's opinion to have remained "essentially British." Auden disdained slang and anarchic versification, but I don't think that constitutes sufficient reason for declaring him un-American.

The oldest poet in this book is Robert Frost, born in 1874 (not 75, as the book claims); the youngest poet is Joel Sloman, born in 1943. The titanic modernists of the early part of the century are well-represented: Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore. And Carruth is unfailingly generous to the lesser figures: Aiken, Van Doren, Yvor Winters, MacLeish, Louise Bogan.

This anthology excels in presenting poets born between 1899 (Allen Tate, Hart Crane) and 1929 (Adrienne Rich). We could list the figures, familiar and not-so-familiar: Lowell, Berryman, Roethke, Duncan, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, Countee Cullen, Robert Hayden, Thomas Merton, Richard Wilbur, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Bly.

Donald Hall is not included, perhaps because he had not yet written his very best work; Richard Howard is not included, presumably because he wasn't a beatnik. James Merrill and John Ashbery are here, as is Hayden Carruth in an admirably modest selection prefaced by an endearingly humble biographical note.

When it comes to poets born after 1930, the anthology is at its least satisfying. There are Sylvia Plath and Wendell Berry, Gary Synder and Gregory Corso, but few others that seem to justify Carruth's endorsement. Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Louise Gluck, Charles Simic and Mark Strand are conspicuous by their absence; and of course, Seamus Heaney is Irish, and -- as we are often reminded in the preface -- this is an American anthology.

All in all, a capacious, generous, inclusive selection, sometimes culpably inclusive; one that should be read in conjunction with other anthologies, ones which contain the indisputably durable examples of the noble and demanding art of poetry.

In Asphalt Georgics, a significant shift in the setting and style of poetry takes place for Mr. Carruth. He had moved from rural Vermont to Syracuse, NY, to take a position teaching at the university. Unless I've been misinformed, the move was one of convenience, as the children of professors would receive free tuition. This poetry was the product of a practical time, when preferences gave way to necessity.

So how does this affect the poetry? For one, Carruth makes an effort to take on the subtle speech patterns and rhythms of Syracuse and environs. This is mostly successful, and not such a small feat. The unique rhythm lends the characters a reality that is both immediate and charming. But the main change comes in his approach. Carruth has been taken from a relatively idyllic setting to a city that, around this time, was rapidly joining the Rust Belt. The setting of Vermont hayfields have given way to strip malls and tract houses, which at that point had lost any sort of artificial lustre they once had. His characters of Spaid and Tanck are bemusedly cynical creations. Although Carruth always brought realism into his work, a deep disatisfaction with suburban and urban American life colors the atmosphere of the poems, and, if you've read much Carruth, you know that atmosphere is everything. I'm hesitant to call this book darker than his others; he's too complex a poet to simply write a "dark" book and a "light" book. But the book left me feeling more uneasy than his others, for what that's worth.

And any book which can affect you in such a strong way deserves a fifth star, I think.

Hayden Carruth, Asphalt Georgics (New Directions, 1985)

Asphalt Georgics stands well out from the Carruth corpus in that the whole book, every poem therein (of which there are thirteen), is written in iambic, either quadrameter or pentameter. Thematically, it makes sense, as much of what is here is a jaundiced look at the excessive civilizing of Vermont, something which Carruth has been despairing of almost as long as he's been writing. Never has he done so as eloquently as he does here, though there is some inconsistency in the quality of the work (however minor that inconsistency may be, as is usually the case with Carruth) and the repeated rhythm tends to make the pieces run together. More a book for browsing than for dedicated reading, but another fine one. *** ½

This collection contains several of Carruth's longer poems, including "The Sleeping Beauty." I picked up this collection to read this poem in my studies and I was impressed. Carruth's poetry is interesting and sparks the imagination with his subtle and genuine style.

W. H. Auden, in his introduction to 19th Century British Minor Poets, established five criteria for being major, of which a candidate must satisfy at least three and a half. The poet must be prolific, demonstrate "wide range in subject matter and treatment," evidence "originality of vision and style," show mastery of verse technique, and continue maturing as a poet until death. Hayden Carruth meets all these conditions, as his Collected Longer Poems demonstrates by itself; taken together with his Collected Shorter Poems (1992), it marks Carruth as a preeminent master. The poems were composed between 1957 and 1983 and have been published in various collections, only one previously unavailable except in a fine-press edition. Three are written in Carruth's trade-mark "paragraphs," rhymed, variably metered fifteen-line stanzas, including The Sleeping Beauty, the heart of Carruth's oeuvre to date. Other poems in the collection are written in sprawling Whitmanesque lines, tercets, free-verse lyrics, and loosened blank verse, the chosen form answering the demands of the subject matter. Few, if any, of Carruth's contemporaries--or immediate predecessors or followers--have demonstrated such extensive mastery.

A commonplace book is a sort of scholar's scrapbook in which to keep quotations etc. that you find useful. As a commonplace book this volume gives wonderful insight into Laughlin's reading/influence -
South Asian holy texts, Japanese novels, classical Latin and Greek texts ... a fascinating and varied collection.

These snapshots (as well as original entries) are in the form of pentastichs - a form Laughlin introduced in his The Secret Room: Poems This is a five line form, short lines, natural voice cadence. One has to wonder if extracting 5 lines from a pre-existing poem legitimately puts it in a new form. I suppose that since Laughlin created the rules ... More interesting to me in terms of form are the poems extracted from prose - a variety of "found poems". Here Lauglin's choice of line breaks and material gives a better sense of how Laughlin envisioned the form. Finally, the original poems show Laughlin, the poet, at work. Here we find several macronic verse (two languages are used), some very witty observations and some sage advice.

Delightful as the book is, recognising how much insight it gives into Laughlin's influences, I still have to wonder. If someone else extracted 5 line segments from others' works and used them as the mainstay of a book of poetry, could they get it published?

I am no reviewer but thank you for asking. My name is Herb Slojewski. I've known Mr. Laughlin's work all my life. This is one of his finest books. Mr. L. was an admirer and supporter of Denise Levertov, who died just a short while ago. Don't miss this one, please. Thanks, Mr. Laughlin! Thank you very much. Herb. Thursday night. Eagle Rock, California 9.9.99--9:09 PM

Nausea is absolutely amazing. This is the book that started everything for me. Education and the pursuit of knowledge became priorities in my life after reading this book, thanks to Sartre. Existentialism may be "dead" to some people, but to the high school or early college student who is disenchanted with the world around them, this is the perfect book to get those intellectual juices flowing. The "self-learned man" who sits at the library reading in alphabetical order everything that he can inspired me greatly. Though not as pretty as Albert Camus, Jean as a certain dramatic and intellectual radiance that Albert had yet to perfect. Do not get me wrong Camus is my hero, but Nausea is the beginning of everything for someone on that lonely path to Truth.

This is the one, only, and very likely last text from Sartre that I will ever read, but it is also one of the very few works of fiction that I'd consider worth reading more than once. It is great. The anti-Vonnegut. I can only imagine how much better it is in the original French. Highly recommended. (Albert Camus' review is useful & more critical; see that for a balanced but more heavy handed substantial commentary.)

Sartre's "Nausea" is a gripping, twitchy little novella confirming the ways one person of unpleasant station can make them self sick , nervous, an odious presence by lingering long on the ambivalent shrug .No one else could write a better tale of an intensely self-aware intellectual whose physical discomforts translate into a changed worldview. Not a lot of laughs, but Sartre does insert his descriptions of bad faith of an intellect aware of his stagnation but whose dread saps strength, and will from him, makes him powerless to do even the simplest exchange. There is, of course, transcendence of a sort, but none are comfortable with its results. The peculiar interest here is the lingering on the problem and an inspection of the illness that infects the spirit as a cumulative consequence of an individual denying their potential and getting by with a bare minimum of engagement. Sartre's fiction and his plays are for those who have an avid interest in those who live in just one room of the many in life's vast mansion.

Even though I'm intrigued by existentialism, I am still struggling to understand what Sartre is trying to tell us in Nausea. The main character, because he finds other humans boring, petty, phony...., he makes a choice to stand away from the rest of humanity. He is a critical observer, the constant cynic. So much easier to stand at a distance and criticize to feel the Nausea that is humanity. The nausea is only one side of the coin, because not all in life is despicable, crass and disgusting, He has chosen to focus on those parts of humanity that are. In doing so he imagines that he has found a sort of freedom and that he has risen above the fray, the ramble of humanity. The reality is that he has focused so much on the bad, the nausea, that he has built a new prison, an incomplete humanity composed of only the bad and none of the good. He comprehends only half of what we are. There is none of the joy, the spontaneity, the passion, only the ache of the nausea.

You have to be in a certain state of mind to read this- anyone who says it's stupid or not a great work or is put off by how he speaks of himself and the city he's in, needs to not read it, but immerse themselves in it, however if one would do that then chances are he'd lose everything else in life, because he cannot control it.

This is one of the best books i've ever read, it's simply brilliant, but only if you understand the feelings he's having.

Hayden Carruth, For You (New Directions, 1970)

For You compiles five long poems from previous in Carruth's career (including "North Winter," reviewed here a few weeks previous), spanning 1958 to 1967. To call some of them long poems is something of a stretch, especially "Contra Mortem," an episodic piece consisting of a number of smaller pieces. Long poems are exceptionally difficult to pull off, and aside from a few potholes along the way, the work in For You holds together surprisingly well (and stands the test of time thirty-five years after publication, for the most part).

Writing more superlatives about Carruth would be overkill. This is good stuff, though it slips a bit now and again (the opening piece, "Asylum," is early work and looks the part, and my criticisms of "North Winter" have already been aired). The Carruth neophyte may be better served starting with Brothers, I Loved You All or Collected Shorter, but the established fan will find much to like here. *** ½

Hayden Carruth, Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Towards the Distant Islands (New Directions, 1990)

I was of the opinion for many years that Hayden Carruth was America's finest living poet. These days, he still ranks, but I often find him more frustrating than anything. He's always straddling the line between real poetry and that vague prose-broken-up-into-lines that is only poetry when maybe a tenth of a percent of writers dabble in it.

The first section of Tell Me Again is full of failed experiments in attempts at vagueness. Value-words, as opposed to images, abound. Not to say there aren't a few successes, but the majority of them are very much prose broken up into lines.

Then comes the second section, and all that goes away. One long poem on the death of his mother, Carruth retreats to where all good poets find their best work; the image. It would, for most people, be impossible to write a poem on such an event (especially one as long as this) without straying into the land of judgment and value, and to be sure, Carruth does on a number of occasions. But here, it works, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Maybe it's because the poem is so rooted in memories (which are, of course, naked image). "Mother" is another of those poems written that make Carruth sound as if he could do no wrong ("Ray," written soon after this, is another; it can be found in Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, and is must reading for any Carruth fan who's never had the pleasure). But rather than there really being a high pint of his career (if he had one, the late eighties and early nineties would be it), this seems another example of Carruth's ability to let fly with a real monster every once in a while, an ability that has stayed with him throughout his career, from the earliest books to the most recent.

Hayden Carruth is without doubt a fine author. Tell Me Again is a good book, certainly better than 99% of the books of poetry out there. But what makes is worth seeking out and buying is "Mother," the long poem that comprises the book's second section. A definite must-read. *** ½