The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990 - 2010

By James Tate

"Tate refutes the idea of surrealism as something remote from daily experience, a hermetic art for a privileged few. For him, surrealism is something very like the air we breathe, the unconscious mind erupting in one-on-one engagements with the life we all live, every day."--John Ashbery 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 what Publishers Weekly has called "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 eccentric, as Charles Simic has observed, "to write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. . . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction." The Eternal Ones of the Dream features Tate's work over the last two decades, selected from seven books of poetry, spanning from 1990's Distance from Loved Ones to 2009's The Ghost Soldiers, showcasing his impressive 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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062101862
• ISBN13: 9780062101860
• Release Date: March 2012
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"