Asphalt Georgics

by Hayden Carruth

In thirteen poems, characters living in upstate New York discuss the death of a landlady, visit their old neighborhood, consider the meaning of their names, and share their observations of nature

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1985

About the author

Hayden Carruth was an American poet, literary critic, and anthologist known for his distinctive voice, blending formal precision with the rhythms of jazz and the blues. Over a career spanning more than sixty years, he published over thirty books of poetry, as well as essays, literary criticism, and anthologies. His work often explored themes of rural life, hardship, mental illness, and social justice, reflecting both his personal struggles and his political convictions.
Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Carruth studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago. His early career included serving as editor-in-chief of Poetry and as an advisory editor of The Hudson Review for two decades. He later became poetry editor at Harper’s Magazine and held teaching positions at Johnson State College, the University of Vermont, and Syracuse University, where he influenced a new generation of poets.
Carruth received numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Collected Shorter Poems (1992) and the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (1996). His later works, such as Doctor Jazz and Last Poems, further cemented his reputation as a major voice in American poetry. His influential anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us remains a landmark collection of American verse.

Reviews

[Patch · Rating 4 out of 5]

its interesting seeing someone else write about a familiar environment, I'm always struck less by how it differs from mine and more by how its the same. There was something playful in the pacing/formatting that I liked. Narrator was a little skeevy though.

[flms23 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having watched the orange groves disappear in The OC, the theme of urban sprawl and the paving over of America's natural landscape has long burned a fire in my heart. And, while I side with environmentalists on the development debate, too much of the writing about the landscape is bleeding heart prose and humorless.

Not so with Hayden Carruth's 1983 collection of poems. I'd read his work in anthologies before but this is my first book length work of his I've read and won't be my last.

His colloquial language fits his theme: the land being covered by concrete.

A few of my favorite lines told from the POV of childhood in the South, a narrator who sees the degradation for what it is, but is powerless to do anything about it.

"Names"
His name/is Eugenio, mine is Sam--/I like that name, that game/too, though utterly valueless,/the animal in us sufficiently domesticated/ our venomous// American aggressiveness/ confined to balls and bats.

(And later)

The heat is said / to be pollution mostly. Don't / ask me. What the hell do / I know?

(Later, talking about a lake they play near)

Dead, hell--it's the oldest / dead lake in North America. / Well, / if you can't be best / you might as well be worst, that's how / we look at it.

[Seth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of almost exclusively rhyming setets of iambic quadrameter and pentameter is not entirely my style. Though Carruth does a wonderful job exploring the form with a sinewy sense of rhyme and syntax, the poetic motivations ultimately seem more sociological than artistically experimental. Carruth's sense of voice, place, and personhood couples with an understated inventiveness to make for a pleasant read. Especially if you're interested in relatively recent poetry that employs less-than-challenging strategies of meaning--poetry, let's say, that is more concerned with the pleasures of reading than with conceptual poetic questions--then this book may be for you. But ultimately I'm left wondering why I'm reading this work and not a book of short stories.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hayden Carruth, Asphalt Georgics (New Directions, 1985)

Asphalt Georgics stands well out from the Carruth corpus in that the whole book, every poem therein (of which there are thirteen), is written in iambic, either quadrameter or pentameter. Thematically, it makes sense, as much of what is here is a jaundiced look at the excessive civilizing of Vermont, something which Carruth has been despairing of almost as long as he's been writing. Never has he done so as eloquently as he does here, though there is some inconsistency in the quality of the work (however minor that inconsistency may be, as is usually the case with Carruth) and the repeated rhythm tends to make the pieces run together. More a book for browsing than for dedicated reading, but another fine one. *** ½

[Lamar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another one of those books of poetry that shows just how great that poetry, poetic language as lived can be.