Memoir of the Hawk: Poems

by James Tate

Overview

Memoir of the Hawk creates a world populated by hundreds of characters, believable and strange, tugged at the edges by the unexpected. In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising pleasures:

... lost in the interstellar space between teacups in the cupboard, found in the beak of a downy woodpecker, the lovers staring into the void and then jumping over it, flying into their beautiful tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060935436
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/30/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

James Tate's poems have been awarded the National Book Award, the Pulitzer

Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Yale

Younger Poets Award, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and

have been translated across the globe. Tate was a member of the American

Academy of Arts and Letters; his many collections include The Lost Pilot, The

Oblivion Ha-Ha, Absences, Distance from Loved Ones, Worshipful Company

of Fletchers, and The Ghost Soldiers. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he made his

home in Pelham, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

New Blood

A huge lizard was discovered drinking
out of the fountain today. It was not menacing
anyone, it was just very thirsty. A small crowd
gathered and whispered to one another, as though
the lizard would understand them if they spoke
in normal voices. The lizard seemed not even
a little perturbed by their gathering. It drank
and drank, its long forked tongue was like a red
river hypnotizing the people, keeping them in a
trance-like state. "It's like a different town,"
one of them whispered. "Change is good," the
other one whispered back.

Memoir of the Hawk. Copyright © by James Tate. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.