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.
""Shapiro writes in sardonic reverence... His poetry is a 'practical use / Of mysterious names.' It is modest, usually simple, but precise, courageous, and unflinching in its sadness.""
Hayden Carruth
""Working within the conventions of alienation and isolation, [Shapiro] develops a quietly distinctive and forceful idiom... Pre-figured in the earlier poems on Jewish and Old Testament themes, and developed in increasingly flexible forms, he makes good his ironic claim of 'praise [of] an age that has no monuments.' Because his irony works dramatically, the brief soliloquies he presents in deliber
