Selected Poems

by Harvey Shapiro, James Atlas (Contributor)

An award-winning gathering of exquisite poems by a celebrated poet.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1992)
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1992)

The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-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.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 1997

About the author

Harvey Shapiro (January 27, 1924 – January 7, 2013) was an American poet and editor of The New York Times. He wrote a dozen books of poetry from 1953 to 2006, writing in epigrammatic style about things in his everyday life. As an editor, he was always affiliated with The New York Times in some capacity, mainly in the magazine and book reviews, from 1957 to 2005.

Reviews

[Kristina · Rating 1 out of 5]

I liked a few of Shapiro's poems, but for the most part, I was disappointed.

[Hubert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid collection of poems about being Jewish, living in New York, particularly late 1900s views of the City. The poems are always evocative of a particular place and way of feeling.