Worshipful Company of Fletchers

by James Tate

Overview

Masterfully drawing on a variety of voices and characters, James Tate joyfully offers his first book since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his "Selected Poems."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780880014311
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/01/1995
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.26(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

Go, Youth

I was in a dreamstate and this was causing a problem
with the traffic. I felt lonely, like I'd missed the boat,
or I'd found the boat and it was deserted. In the middle
of the road a child's shoe glistened. I walked around it.
It woke me up a little. The child had disappeared. Some
mysteries are better left alone. Others are dreary, distasteful,
and can disarrange a shadow into a thing of unspeakable beauty.
Whose child is that?
Worshipful Company of Fletchers. Copyright © by James Tate. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

...Mr. Tate's gift is such that many of [his] poems move me at least to plain envy of what he can do.

W.S. Merwin

[James Tate] never ceases to astonish, dismay, delight, confuse, tickle, and generally improve the quality of our lives.

John Ashbery

Tate's poems are meditative, introverted, self-reliant, funny, alarming, strange, difficult, intelligent, and beautifully crafted. He is an impressive writer whose process of imaginative growth is through that deliberate extinction of personality which T.S. Eliot called for as the indispensable means of turning a man or woman of powerful personality into a writer of powerful poems.

New York Times Book Review

Tate is a pure and unique American poet....His new book is as fresh and moving as his appreciators have come to expect. Worshipful Company of Fletchers is one of the best examples of sharp-as-a-tack contemporary American languageliveliness you're likely to find on bookshelves these days, and it has the added advantage of not being soulless.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

No other writer is quite like Tate (Reckoner). His earnest verbal anarchy is visual, musical and difficult to characterize or resist. Jazzlike, he seems to invent experience, not just poetry, and the effect is exhilarating for a reader. What is his work about? Envisioning possibilities, and then criticizing, selecting and amending these. Reading a poem is like entering into someone else's rant or vision; one passes through many surprising points of contact in a cloud of apprehension. The encounter for a reader is incongruous, quickening and qualified by Tate's sardonic sense of mischief. ``We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes,'' he suggests in ``How The Pope is Chosen,'' and in fact Tate conducts himself rather like a germ: fugitive, vital, typically disruptive. The charm of his quick-witted exploits is considerable-but ``charm'' doesn't really describe the intense pleasures of a high-riding imagination that pauses to observe that ``a melancholy bug preens its antennae'' or to report that ``a child has left home and fallen asleep/ on her pink valise beneath a tulip tree.'' (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Tate uses a vast range of images in his first collection of poetry since winning the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems (Wesleyan Univ. Pr., 1991). Only a poet of great sensitivity could know what it is like for "the black-eyed Susans and tiger lilies pushing up/against the odds." These poems invite us into the speaker's living room to share his "house skylarking with broken eyeglasses and books,/pillows and postcards." Personal intimacy unfolds before us as the speaker acknowledges that "the poem has passed./It was here, in this room." The speaker even allows us to witness the creative process as he shows us the daily trivia that fills most of our lives, obscuring life's beauty. The freshness and tenderness of this book is rare, and enjoying its "immense ritual" of poetry should make readers very happy. Highly recommended.-Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, Pa.

Library Journal