In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate continues exploring his own peculiar brand of poetry, transforming our everyday world into one where women give birth to wolves, wild babies are found in gardens, and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day. Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar, but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and eccentric.
Yet, as Charles Simic observed in The New York Review of Books, "With all his reliance on chance, Tate has a serious purpose. He's searching for a new way to write a lyric poem." He continues, "To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. For him, the poem is something one did not know was there until it was written down ... Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction ... Tate is not worried about leaving us a little dazed ... He succeeds in ways for which there are few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had."

Return to the City of White Donkeys: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Tate, James

Poetry

Ecco

In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate continues exploring his own peculiar brand of poetry, transforming our everyday world, a world where women give birth to wolves, wild babies are found in gardens, and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day. Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar, but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and eccentric.
Yet, as Charles Simic observed in the New York Review of Books, "With all his reliance on chance, Tate has a serious purpose. He's searching for a new way to write a lyric poem." He continues, "To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. For him, the poem is something one did not know was there until it was written down. . . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction. . . . Tate is not worried about leaving us a little dazed. . . . He succeeds in ways for which there are a few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had."

RETURN TO CITY WHI DONKEYS

Essays & Correspondence

EccoPress

Memoir of the Hawk creates a world populated by hundreds of characters, believable and strange, tugged at the edges by the unexpected. In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising pleasures: . . . lost in the interstellar space between teacups in the cupboard, found in the beak of a downy woodpecker, the lovers staring into the void and then jumping over it, flying into their beautiful tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.

Memoir of the Hawk: Poems

Self-Help

Relationships

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate returns with his fifteenth book of poetry, an exciting new collection that offers nearly one hundred fresh and thought-provoking pieces that embody Tate's trademark style and voice: his accessibility, his dark humor, and his exquisite sense of the absurd.
Tate's work is stark—he writes in clear, everyday language—yet his seemingly simple and macabre stories are layered with broad and trenchant meaning. His characters are often lost or confused, his settings bizarre, his scenarios brilliantly surreal. Opaque, inscrutable people float through a dreamlike world where nothing is as it seems. The Ghost Soldiers offers resounding proof, once again, that Tate stands alone in American poetry.

The Ghost Soldiers: Poems

Humor & Satire

In this, his fifteenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate continues doing what he does best. His poems are evocative, provocative, funny, subtle, eccentric, occasionally disturbing, and wildly outrageous. Tate′s surrealist style strikes its own utterly new and original note in American poetry; as Charles Simic has observed, "To write a poem out of nothng at all is Tate′s genius. . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction. . . He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had." Father′s Day My daughter has lived overseas for a number of years now. She married into royalty, and they won′t let her communicate with any of her family or friends. She lives on birdseed and a few sips of water. She dreams of me constantly. Her husband, the Prince, whips her when he catches her dreaming. Fierce guard dogs won′t let her out of their sight. I hired a detective, but he was killed trying to rescue her. I have written hundreds of letters to the State Department. They have written back saying that they are aware of the situation. I never saw her dance. I was always away at some convention. I never saw her sing. I was always working late. I called her My Princess, to make up for my shortcomings, and she never forgave me. Birdseed was her middle name.

“Tate’s poems are meditative, introverted, self-reliant, funny, alarming, strange, difficult, intelligent, and beautifully crafted.” —New York Times The Eternal Ones of the Dream is a breathtaking collection of poems from the last two decades of work of one of modern American poetry’s major artists, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate. Tate’s remarkable work—filled with dark wit, dry humor, and deceptive simplicity—is considered among the most accessible poetry written in the last several decades, and it has inspired acclaimed poet W.S. Merwin to write, “Mr. Tate’s gift is such that many of [his] poems move me at least to plain envy of what he can do.”

ETERNAL ONES DREAM

The seventeenth book of verse from one of America’s finest and most acclaimed contemporary poets—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Capturing his inimitable voice—provocative, amusing, understated, and riotous all at once—the poems in Dome of the Hidden Pavilion demonstrate James Tate at his finest. Innovative and fresh, they range in subject from a talking blob to a sobering reminiscence of a war and its aftereffects.
Though they are diverse in scope, a theme of dialogue and communication—and often miscommunication—links these poems. Accessible yet subtly surrealist, filled with dark wit, dry humor, and a deceptive simplicity, Dome of the Hidden Pavilion confirms Tate’s continuing relevance as one of the most celebrated American poets of the modern age.

Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems

United States

DOME HIDDEN PAVILION

GOVT LAKE

The stunning, startling collection that is also the last work from a major poet A woman named Mildred starts laying eggs after feathers from wild poultry begin coming down the chimney. A man becomes friends with a bank robber who abducts him and eventually rues his captor’s death. A baby is born transparent. 
James Tate’s work, filled with unexpected turns and deadpan exaggeration, “fanciful and grave, mundane and transcendent,” (New York Times) has been among the most defining and significant of our time. In his last collection before his death in 2015, Tate’s dark yet whimsical humor, his emotional acuity, and his keen ear for the absurd are on full display in prose poems that finely constructed and lyrical, surrealistic and provocative. 
With The Government Lake, James Tate reminds us why he is one of the great poets of our age and one of the true masters of the form.

The Government Lake: Last Poems

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tate, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Tate, James

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tate, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Return to the City of White Donkeys: Poems

RETURN TO CITY WHI DONKEYS

Memoir of the Hawk: Poems

The Ghost Soldiers: Poems

The Ghost Soldiers: Poems

ETERNAL ONES DREAM

Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems

DOME HIDDEN PAVILION

The Government Lake: Last Poems

GOVT LAKE