Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems
About this book
“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 “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 oftenduring recent years, in letters to friends, even inwords for public print. And what does it mean? Cana civilization crumble? At once appears the imageof an old slice of bread, stale and hard, green with mold,shaped roughly like the northeastern United States, yearsold or more, so hard and foul that even my pal Maxie,the shepherd/husky cross who eats everything, won’ttouch it. And it is crumbling, turning literally intocrumbs, as the millions of infinitesimal internal connectingfibers 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.