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 ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: First edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Ecco
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780061436949ISBN:0061436941
Description: Fine in very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 217 p. Audience: General/trade. FIrst Printing of this latest collection of poetry. Book has minor corner wear else Fine condition in Near Fine dustjacket with light edgewear. New mylar protector. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Ecco Pr
Date Published: 2008-04-01
ISBN-13:9780061436949ISBN:0061436941
Description: NEW. Hardcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780061436949. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Ecco
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780061436949ISBN:0061436941
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Description: Very good. Used ex library book in very good condition. The usual library markings. The mylar dustcover, cover and binding are in very good condition. The pages are unmarked. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper Collins
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780061436949ISBN:0061436941
Description: New, Publisher overstock, may have small remainder mark. Excellent condition, never read, purchased from publisher as excess inventory. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper Collins
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780061436949ISBN:0061436941
Description: New, Publisher overstock, may have small remainder mark. Excellent condition, never read, purchased from publisher as excess inventory. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Ecco
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780061436949ISBN:0061436941
Description: Fine. Ecco 2008 SOFTCOVER. Prerelease version. From Starred Review. Over the past several books, the prolific Pulitzer Prize winner Tate (Return to the City of White Donkeys) 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, from civil unrest ( 'There are soldiers ... read more
Description: 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... read more
"James Tate's The Ghost Soldiers: A Parasitic Reflection
Can desperation, banality, and "bad writing" make it into writing without making it actualized bad writing? If it can, and I certainly think it can, then James Tate has accomplished this (par excellence) in The Ghost Soldiers. His vacillations across the continuum of contemporaneity are parasitic (in the Umberto Eco sense of that word), which means: that his textual accomplishment questions what it is to create texts, narratives, and poetry (so much for "soft surrealist"), and, maybe even more importantly, what it is to read those texts, those narratives, and poetry in that exclusive contemporary wordscape.
For Tate once the fabric of reality is torn one is either swept away in a current of meaninglessness or one finds a way to distance oneself and observe the spectacle. But observation is, by no means, enough. The strictly empirical being, in thinking that she has found proximity, has become merely a monument of the spectacle: albeit a monument at a distance.
Not only is James Tate philosophically and existentially relevant (as if that were not enough), but with each new collection (and this is his newest) he seems to be extending his dialogical breath far beyond our Postmodern epoch. This extension is not, in any way, constructed out of a pedantic pushing of the economy of language (which is a hallmark of Post-structural poetics with its immersion in the convoluted for convulsion's sake pretensions); in fact Tate maintains the sheen of folksy banter and lyrical levity throughout. The point: James Tate is present-future of poetry: if poetry has the potential to fortify its relevance and importance within the sphere of "the language of inquiry" and speak to the furthering of the philosophical investigations (and it should go without saying that I think it most certainly does and to shrug it off by calling it faux philosophical is quotidian at best).
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"There were some bald men in a field pushing a huge ball, but the ball wasn't moving... A woman walked by and stopped beside me. "What are those men doing down there?" she said. "It's a warrior thing," I said. "They're working out some technical problems. They're protecting us from evil, but the plan is still in the stages of development." "Does that big ball represent evil?" she said. "It's either evil or good. They're still trying to work that one out," I said. "Some men live on such an exalted plane, it's a wonder anything ever gets done, " she said. "I meant that as a compliment of course."""
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