Selected Poems

The Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of exquisite poems by “a poet of mad wit and stunning anecdote. Tate is now in the fullness of his powers” (Julian Moynahan, author of Sisters and Brothers).

Selected Poems, James Tate’s award-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection Reckoner. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate has been described as a surrealist. If that is what he is, his surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by his unillusioned subversion and candor.

“This volume performs a valuable service by drawing together the best of Tate’s work from many individual collections, some of them now quite rare. It allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting. Not unexpectedly, it confirms his standing as one of the finest voices of his generation” —John Ashbery, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

“He has the rare ability to be very, very funny on the page.” —The New York Times Book Review