This was the last book that James Tate wrote before his death in 2015. Many people are unfamiliar with Tate’s poetry, but he had won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, among many other awards and prizes. He was also honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
But it was just a few years ago that I first read and fell in love with his work. His work was accessible, as he didn’t bring in esoteric figures from ancient mythology, or try to impress his readers with little-known vocabulary that was shoehorned into his poetry. It was his later prose poetry that was my very favorite. His style always surprised. You would be reading along, lulled into a story, a feeling, and then you’d come to a major shift, and his humor would grab you and run off in some bizarre unexpected direction … and it was the best of odd. Most always, he would spin the wheel and quickly end the poem, and you were left—maybe a little confused at first—but I always found a smile or a smirk on my face.
I can only hope that there’s more Tate prose poetry squirreled away, waiting to be published in the next few years, but this was a fine collection that did all those things that his poetry did for me. ( )