Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 Book

Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 presents all the lyric, short narrative, comic, meditative, nature, and erotic poetry the poet has chosen from the past forty-five years, including a section of new poems not found in his previous twenty-two books. It is an extraordinary literary event. Hayden Carruth has been one of the most widely published and admired American poets for many years. Noted for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, influenced by jazz and the blues, Carruth gives his poems--whether sexual political, or narrative--a philosophical resonance that raises them beyond the ego-centered narrowness of much contemporary writing and makes them powerfully moving. Carruth is a New Englander (now living in New York), and many of his best-known poems are about the people and places of northern Vermont. His explorations of rural poverty and hardship, sometimes grim, sometimes funny, are deeply informed by political radicalism and cultural responsibility. Carruth has been editor of Poetry, poetry editor of Harper's, for many years advisory editor of The Hudson Review, and his influential anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, is the standard collection of 20th-century American poetry. He has published one novel and three collections of essays. He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bollingen Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (including a 1988 Senior Fellowship), and his work has won many prizes and awards, including the Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Governor's Medal from the State of Vermont.


About the Author

Hayden Carruth, a long-time resident of Vermont, now lives in upstate New York, where he taught for many years in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. He has published twenty-three 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 has been 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, have awarded fellowships to Carruth, and he has been presented with the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Vermont Governor's Medal, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Whiting Award, and the Ruth Lily Prize.

Publishers Weekly

...such titles as "A Little Old Funky Homeric Blues for Herm" and "Asphalt Georgics" signal Carruth's gradual attraction to the vernacular, the eventual embrace of which in his formal measures has resulted in some fine poems