Hayden Carruth

Hayden Carruth, one of the most acclaimed poets of our age, lives his music--finding the perfect low tones of terrible loss and high riffs of family and friendship. Carruth keeps getting better.--The New YorkerCarruth's new poems are, essentially, songs of praise and celebrations of beauty; for all the real anguish and pain they record, they remain enactments of a fundamental attitude of faith and wonder.--Times Literary Supplement (London)The elegiac gravity of 'Dearest M--, ' on a daughter's death, refuses to release us until its final syllable.--Library Journal (starred review)

Hayden Carruth is a major literary figure and no survey of American poetry is complete without inclusion of his work. In this newest book of poems--the first since his 1996 National Book Award--Carruth confronts the threadbare memories of old age and the fading winter view. From the bleakest circumstances--the death of his daughter, physical and mental pain, poverty--Carruth defiantly reclaims dignity and beauty. His poetry is at once classical and modern. With the spit and bop of a great jazzman playing all the right notes, Carruth lives his music, finding the perfect low tones of terrible loss, the highs of family and friendship. Yet he is also the wise old sage of classical Greece, warning, riddling, giving generous counsel and insight. At Seventy-Five: Rereading an Old BookMy prayers have been answered, if they were prayers. I live. I'm alive, and even in rather good health, I believe. If I'd quit smoking I might live to be a hundred. Truly this is astonishing, after the poverty and pain, The suffering. Who would have thought that petty Endurance could achieve so much? And prayers-- Were they prayers? Always I was adamant In my irreligion, and had good reason to be. Yet prayer is not, I see in old age now, A matter of doctrine or discipline, but rather A movement of the natural human mind Bereft of its place among the animals, the other Animals. I prayed. Then on paper I wrote Some of the words I said, which are these poems. Hayden Carruth has won nearly every major award in poetry, including the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's circle Award. He is the author of 24 previous books of poetry and prose. He lives in Munnsville, NY.

Reveals the life of the poet chronicling his chronic depression, his love of jazz music, and his suicide attempt

Ten poems spanning fifty years, are the companion to Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems, recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. "The work here seems to break every rule of modern poetry, yet it succeeds.... This volume displays the huge range, both in theme and form, of a poet who pushes his art to its limits, then beyond."--Publishers Weekly starred review

In Suicides and Jazzers, Hayden Carruth reveals as never before the hard experiences that have shaped his life and art. In the lead essay, entitled "Suicide," he speaks of the psychiatric illness he has lived with for most of his life and his attempted suicide in 1988. In "Fragments of Autobiography," he shares memories of a Connecticut childhood, early ruminations about death, and his coming-of-age in small-town America. A major essay on the poetry of Paul Goodman is followed by shorter essays on Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Donald Hall, and Carolyn Kizer. In sections entitled "Elegies," "Reviews," and "Musical" Carruth celebrates fine writers and musicians who he feels have been intentionally neglected by the establishment, including authors Grace Paley and David Ignatow, tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, and, in "The Spun-Off Independent Dead-End Ten-Star Blast," white jazz musicians.

Lyric, erotic, and meditative, this collection stands as a monument to the technical virtuosity of one of the major poets of our time. Rarely do poets earn the unqualified admiration of both their academic and experimental peers, but Carruth--through his artistic versatility and critical ecumenism--has been doing just that for half a century.--Library Journal

Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands is Hayden Carruth’s fourth book of poetry with New Directions. This is a full and rich collection which has been separated into two parts. Part one offers a varied wealth of poems, remarkable as always for their meditative powers and for their “principled alertness…” (NYTBR). The seccond part is one long poem, “Mother,” a work of fierce emotion addressing the long life and slow torturous death of Carruth’s own mother.

America’s paved-over landscape dotted with its oases of shopping malls and franchise strips is the setting for Hayden Carruth’s Asphalt Georgics, a new collection of thirteen poems in the common speech of Upstate New York. Here are the voices of Charlie Spaid, talking of the death of his landlady, Marge; of Septic Tanck, musing on his own peculiar name; of old Capper Kaplinski, still watching the girls pass by; of Art and Poll, back in the old neighborhood. What they tell about their lives is hardly what they themselves would ever expect to read in the pages of a book of poetry. Yet to capture the rhythms of their very colloquial language, Hayden Carruth has invented a new verse form, his Georgics-quatrains in strict syllables and rhyme, though with no accentual pattern––which achieve by their special artifice a classic and earthy elegance.

Hayden Carruth's books of poetry include Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1995, Collected Shorter Poems, and Collected Longer Poems. His awards include the Lannan Literary Award, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This famous anthology includes the works of more than 130 major American poets of the modern period--Robert Frost, Paul Goodman, Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks among them--along with short biographies of each. "Not only the best on its period, I think, but it is even perhaps safe from the competition of rivals."--Robert Lowell"What an achievement, these sixty years of poetry! In whatever terms we Americans regard the rest of our recent history, the score of things done well and done ill, this much at least we have done superlatively."--Hayden Carruth

This book collects five long poems that have previously appeared, with one exception, only in magazines and limited editions. One critic has called them "virtually secret." Yet they are probably the heart of Carruth’s poetic achievement, both technically and thematically. Rising from the experience of emotional illness and the asylum, the poems move at intervals and over a period of nearly fifty years toward a sustained, workable view of humanity in crisis." I have tried to create a person," Carruth writes, "specifically a seeing, living, surmounting person. Modesty is important, and so are winter and the north. A man alone in the snow is still much in this world, including the social world, though his ’in-ness’ is naturally a form of rebellion." The poems included are The Asylum, Journey to a Known Place, North Winter, Contra Mortem and My Father’s Face.

Once again, the setting for many of the pieces is the Green Mountains of Vermont, where the poet and his family have lived for several years. A member of the editorial board of The Hudson Review and a regular contributor to numerous periodicals, he is the editor of the recent comprehensive paperbook anthology The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (1970).