The Eternal Ones of the Dream - by James Tate (Paperback)

About the Book

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. "

Book Synopsis

"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."

From the Back Cover

A breathtaking collection of work from 1990 to 2010 by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate

James Tate's poems are evocative, provocative, funny, subtle, eccentric, occasionally disturbing, and wildly outrageous. His surrealist style strikes its own utterly new and original note in American poetry, transforming our everyday world into sublime burlesque--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 deeply particular.

The Eternal Ones of the Dream features Tate's work from the last two decades, selected from seven books of poetry. The poems span from 1990's Distance from Loved Ones to 2009's The Ghost Soldiers, showcasing the impressive breadth of talent. As W. S. Merwin said of Tate, "Mr. Tate's gift is such that many of [his] poems move me at least to plain envy of what he can do."

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR GHOST SOLDIERS: "Bottom Line: Atypical in form, the poems resonate with Tate's familiar voice: plainspoken, quizzical, and deeply interested in small, revealing gestures. A-." - Entertainment Weekly
"These character-driven poems are variations on a theme: the intrusion of the unexpected on the ordinary and the ordinary on the unexpected. Some take the form of dialogues, sprinkled with misunderstandings; others are first-person musings in which the natural world seems to conspire against the human subject. The aggregation of these vignettes--by turns whimsical, disquieting, and ecstatic--achieves a Yoknapatawpha-like effect of hermetic wholeness. Meanwhile, the banal and the metaphysical are gleefully mixed ("The stuff under / the bed could be the residue of dreams"), and a wide-eyed quality accompanies the oddities ("I've always been amazed / that we don't just fall off the planet and float around like so / much space debris"). "Raking Day" is the volume's masterpiece, a mock epic that sweeps the reader up as quickly and unceremoniously as its narrator is engulfed by the leaves he is attempting to tame: " They / waft me off the ground and blanket me in golden sunlight." - The New Yorker
"If you're already a fan of Charles Simic's you might like Tate...the prosy narratives of The Ghost Soldiers appear to happen to ordinary people but reveal the current conditions of a world that's spun out of control...some of Tate's poems are cute ("When I got home from the office, the elves had rearranged my furniture."), but the best of them are slightly scary, revealing the terrifying consequences that obscure purposes can apparently generate." - Chicago Tribune
"Over the past several books, the prolific Pulitzer Prize winner Tate has been inching toward the invention of a new kind of American poem, a hybrid of prose poetry (though he's got loose, almost arbitrary line breaks), fable, surrealism and a sort of outsider folk poetry. These chatty, narrative works humorously treat all kinds of subjects...A dark undercurrent runs beneath them all, and war and politics - which tend to confuse the poems' speakers - are frequent subjects. It's rare that a poet so far into his career - this is Tate's 15th collection - comes up with something new; quietly, Tate has found a fresh way of telling some of America's stories." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In his newest collection, this veteran poet seems to be suffering from a kind of literary post-traumatic stress disorder--a reaction, perhaps, to what he sees as the Orwellian state of Iraq War-era America--which manifests itself in cynicism so profound that it borders on nihilism. The poems share a bottomless disillusionment that comes from a sense that nothing makes sense, nothing matters, nothing can be done. Human connection seems impossible in poems full of meetings between acquaintances who might as well be strangers and who engage, with often comically bizarre effect, in conversation dominated by non sequiturs....occasionally, the fog lifts...." - Booklist