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Lyric Journey
Over many years of reading poetry, I've come to trust that any poetry book published by Copper Canyon Press is going to be an adventure. This collection , hand-picked by Press founder, Sam Hill, is no exception. I'd read enough of Hayden Carruth's work that I expected to be impressed, and I was.

The poems are selected from 12 previous collections (oh, if all of us poets could boast of so many published books!) with an addition of new poems at finish to keep the appetite whetted for more yet to come. It is interesting to watch for change and growth in the whole of Carruth's work, but that his talent was richly showing early on - the first batch selected dates back to 1959's "The Crow and the Heart" - is clear:

Of all disquiets sorrow is most serene.
Its interval of soft humility
Are lenient; they intrude on our obscene
Debasements and our fury like a plea
For wisdom...

Sorrow can shape us better than dismay.

Carruth understands the peaks and valleys of a man's life. As Sam Hill notes in his introduction, this is a poet who has struggled with angels and demons alike, finding both in himself. So his work reflects such struggles, and we swing upwards with him to whisper with angels, just as we slide into shadows with him, to weep and gnash teeth with dark demons. If a poet creates often from the grit inside him, as an oyster its pearl, then this poet proves the old axiom. We must know the demon to recognize the angel; we must strive to be angelic to fully understand the power of the demonic.

Carruth writes glorious love poems to his wife, filled with appetite and relish and adoration. He writes love poems to his daughter, lost too early to cancer. He writes love poems to the natural world around him, and to the characters that are found in humanity. He writes love poems to sorrow.

This is a poet who lives his life seam to seam, depth to height, and journals it into his lyric work. To share in his journey, this is a collection not to be missed. ... Read more

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Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey
I liked less than half of the poems, but the poems that I liked were very good.I am glad that I have the book.I will try another book by him.

Poems with great range
From the title of Carruth's Collection, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, the reader expects a Bukowskiesque collection of poems, but in actuality Carruth's work has great dexterity and range of emotion, is quite supple in its expressive quality, and has the capacity to do a lot of heavy, emotional lifting in a confined space.In this collection, three major themes are explored: Carruth's coming death, his marriage to a much younger woman, (and her fate after he is gone) and the cancer of his adult daughter.Carruth weaves these themes and others into a series of poems which, although outwardly simple in terms of language and style, really penetrate the mysteries of life and death.Of course, death is the main character here, but Carruth is rounded enough in his view to see redemption everywhere, especially in death's nemesis, love.

Carruth's poems penetrate deep beneath the surface
Do yourself a favor and pick up SCRAMBLED EGGS & WHISKEY -- and follow Hayden Carruth on a journey that masterfully and humbly moves from the most troubling, trying scenes from life to the most redeeming to the everyday and a whole, whole lot in between. Rhythmic, with obvious jazz sensibilities -- and with so much truth -- these poems get to the heart of the matter in ways that make you nod in agreement, laugh out loud or pause in grieving silence or certain solidarity. I am glad this is the book that introduced me to the huge body of Mr. Carruth's work. ... Read more

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Good collection of earlier work.
Hayden Carruth, For You (New Directions, 1970)

For You compiles five long poems from previous in Carruth's career (including "North Winter," reviewed here a few weeks previous), spanning 1958 to 1967. To call some of them long poems is something of a stretch, especially "Contra Mortem," an episodic piece consisting of a number of smaller pieces. Long poems are exceptionally difficult to pull off, and aside from a few potholes along the way, the work in For You holds together surprisingly well (and stands the test of time thirty-five years after publication, for the most part).

Writing more superlatives about Carruth would be overkill. This is good stuff, though it slips a bit now and again (the opening piece, "Asylum," is early work and looks the part, and my criticisms of "North Winter" have already been aired). The Carruth neophyte may be better served starting with Brothers, I Loved You All or Collected Shorter, but the established fan will find much to like here. *** ½ ... Read more

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Honest, Funny, Tender, and True
These letters from Hayden Carruth to Jane Kenyon are an intriguing exploration of a relationship between two great poets.I have always been curious about poets' letters, since they write things in letters they might not reveal under any other circumstances, even, perhaps, in their own poems.For instance, in his letter of May 9, 1994, Carruth writes:"So I frittered away the weekend:read a short manuscript, wrote a few letters, watched a hell of a lot of basketball, read what we used to call cheap-screw fiction.I haven't heard that term for a while.At first it meant under-the-counter porn, but later came to mean any escapist literature.As a consequence, on top of the desperation and depression, I feel guilt.What else is new?"For those who picture the writer's life as one in which the author sits thoughtfully poised over a manuscript 24-hours a day, this may come as a revelation:writers waste time, they struggle to keep themselves on track, they fail, they get depressed as a result of their failures.I find this revelation uplifting rather than sad:it shows Carruth's nuts and bolts existence and in doing so, reveals his humanity. In another letter he talks about having to take his laptop computer to a repair shop because of "excessive cat hair."Carruth, a lover of cats, says that his repairman suggested he get rid of the cat whereupon Carruth admits to Kenyon:"I said immediately, 'Oh, I can't do that,' implying that my wife wouldn't stand for it, which was a cowardly way out, and no doubt sexist too.The fact is I wouldn't stand for it either."Such moments of marvelous self-disclosure are frequent in this book.If you are holding off buying this because you've read other authors' letters and found them boring, don't hesitate any longer.Carruth's presence in these letters is huge.These letters are honest, funny, tender, and true.I am in awe of the relationship Carruth and Kenyon had, and a bit envious, too.I highly recommend this book for writers and for those interested in 20th Century poetry. ... Read more

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Collected Shorter Poems presents hundreds of lyric, short narrative, comic, meditative, nature, and erotic poems that Hayden Carruth wrote over a forty-five year period. This is a reissue of the book, with new cover design. Noted for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, influenced by jazz and the blues, Carruth gives his poems a philosophical resonance. His explorations of rural poverty and hardship— sometimes grim, sometimes funny—are deeply informed by political radicalism and cultural responsibility.Amazon.com Review
For decades Carruth has been admired by other writers for hisuse of varied forms and styles, and, as didFrostbefore him, he has won the loyalty of many readers with his keenobservations of language and the everyday. This extensive collectionranges widely, from Hayden Carruth's early 1950s traditional works tohis later anti-war poems; from his sensual explorations to morenarrative works. Carruth includes what others might discard as ugly,and speaks quietly where others might bombast. It is this quality thatmakes Carruth a talented poet, unique voice and subtlecritic. Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 won a National BookCritics Circle Award in 1992. ... Read more

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A Gathering of the Best of the Best
One of the most significant poetry publications at the end of the twentieth century is Hayden Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems. For too long Carruth suffered the lack of a consistent publisher; as a result, much of his best work has gone unnoticed or too little noticed. Notable in a volume as diverse as this are Carruth's monologues and poems about characters delivered in lines that echo their speech; as the speaker in "John Dryden" notes, "have you noticed / I can't talk about him without talking like him?" Like Frost, Carruth captures a sense of character and place while subtly presenting a complex set of meanings, discovering the kind of "natural symbol" ordinary people grapple with to understand their lives. One of the most powerful, "Marvin McCabe," is a monologue by an inarticulate speaker whose friend "Hayden" acts as amanuensis for the poem. Marvin McCabe details his upbringing and the accident that left him incapacitated--able to think but not talk. Other poems in this mode include "Johnny Spain's White Heifer," "Lady," "Marshall Washer," and "Regarding Chainsaws."

Carruth's lyrics display a range of diction and vocabulary which allows him to modulate easily from low to high style and to incorporate moments of humor in otherwise serious, even solemn poems without violating that tone. His lyrics often derive from careful observation of the natural world, not merely to see things but to consider. Typically, Carruth presents his observations through details objective enough to allow us to "see" the situation yet in language that renders the emotional construct of the subject.

The later poems in the volume, following Carruth's move to Syracuse, New York, in 1979, shift not only idiom and locale, as in Asphalt Georgics, a group of poems written in syllabic ballad stanzas employing frequently hyphenated enjambments, but open up very different poetic territory in the Whitmanesque-lined and loopingly discursive poems from Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands. The first of these laments the passing of the agrarian lifestyle that provided the basis for traditional georgics while celebrating the persistence of human life amid suburban sprawl that threatens that spirit. The strategies of apparent tangent and indirection Carruth uses to build these poems evolves into structures, in the second, which accumulate like jazz riffs and motifs: they seem to diverge wildly from the "point" of the poem only to swoop around at the end to enlarge the idea of point.

Finally, a collected poems provides a perspective on a poet's career. And this volume demonstrates what some readers have long known: Hayden Carruth possesses greater range of style, scope of subject, and diversity of formal skills than any other poet working in the United States today.

Especially...
Especially poignant is Carruth's poem "Marvin McCabe," the story of a man who loses his power of speech in a drunk-driving accident.. ... Read more

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Beautiful, as always.
Hayden Carruth, From Snow and Rock, from Chaos (New Directions, 1973)

Hayden Carruth has long been one of the finest poets America has to offer, and this slim volume offers a good number of reasons why. The fifty-eight pages of this collection (which can still be found for its extremely low cover price at Amazon thirty years later!) are far less intimidating to the Carruth novice than the eight hundred plus of Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, and while the book doesn't include anything of the magnitude of "Ray" or The Bloomingdale Papers, there is more than enough brilliance here to whet the reader's appetite for more of Carruth's soft, often witty poetry. Moving between structure and free verse with a sure hand in both, there is something in this collection for just about everyone. If you haven't yet discovered Carruth, this is an excellent starting point. **** ½ ... Read more

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Autobiographical Essays. These touching and intimate essays reveal the integrity of Hayden Carruth-- one of the most solitary, esteemed, and controversial poets of this century. Despite his wide erudition, he has lived largely outside academia. These essays chronicle a lifetime of wrestling with his personal demons and muses; time spent hospitalized for severe chronic depression; a passionate love of jazz and blues; his suicide attempt; and most of all, his uncommon, unflinching honesty.Amazon.com Review
Readers unfamiliar with the poetry of Hayden Carruth will bestruck by the honesty and clarity of his new book of autobiographicalessays. A solid introduction to his interior world, Reluctantlyalso serves well as a supplement to Carruth's 50 years of publishingpoetry, criticism, and one fine, underread novel, AppendixA. Now in his late 70s, Carruth has witnessed from his seclusionin remote New England the rise and fall of myriad intellectual,political, and poetical movements. In his essays, he sets thesepassages alongside events in his own life as if to find explanationsfor the absurdity of one in the chaos of the other. As the titlesuggests, it is with great reluctance that he discusses his suicideattempts, hospitalizations, nervous breakdowns, divorces, and otherdisappointments. Yet in his memory these events are so intertwinedwith his successes and joys, indeed with his whole creativeenterprise, that he is compelled to give both equal time. At times,the essays' careful manipulation of style and sound approaches themeasured reverie of Carruth's poetry, especially when discussing hisyears in northern Vermont, the setting for many of his more famouspoems. He describes in great detail the cowshed he converted into awriting cabin, and in fact the book's main characters besides himselfare his neighbors there, Martin and Frances Parkhurst, through whosefriendship Carruth relearned the social skills he felt he lost duringa series of bad crackups in his 30s.

For whatever reason, Carruth remains elliptical about some of the moresignificant details of his life. For many years he was the editor ofPoetry. Prior to that he was part of the Allied Army force thatinvaded Italy during World War II. He mentions these experiences onlybriefly, then, for example, writes three paragraphs about watching afrozen bobcat slowly decompose during a spring thaw. Unlike TobiasWolff and Mary Karr, his former colleagues at Syracuse University, whoonly mildly retooled their styles for their memoirs This Boy's Lifeand The Liars'Club, Carruth employs the autobiographical mode as a footnoteto his real work. There are more specific details of his life in hisNationalBook Award-winning collection, Scrambled Eggs &Whiskey, than in Reluctantly. What Carruth captureshere is more ephemeral yet more vital than a mere autobiography. Givena chance to explain his love of jazz, or his suicide attempt, or hispsychoanalysis, Carruth indulges in tangents in ways his strictpoetics would never entertain. There is something fitting about theauthor allowing himself a few autobiographical reflections at thispoint in his career, and his reluctance only heightens their value.--Edward Skoog ... Read more

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A minor work, in the greater canon.
Hayden Carruth, The Sleeping Beauty (Copper Canyon, 1990)

The Sleeping Beauty is a long (125-section) poem from Carruth, one that seems fragmented at first but gradually pulls together; mythology, dreams, jazz, all worked into something that could equally be a poem of love or hate, depending on the reader's perspective. As is usual with Carruth, the language flows, but often with the speed of cold molasses; Carruth's work goes from being accessible to being thick, sometimes within the same poem.

Not a good place to start with Carruth (the best place is Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, also released by Copper Canyon), but definitely worthy for established fans. *** ... Read more

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Smart, Insightful, and Clear
What a pleasure to read an artist who absolutely knows what he is doing!"Part of the Bargain" is distinguished and original.The book seems to celebrate the delicateness of the human condition while recognizing the harshness of the grief that comes with the territory.Without being arcane, archaic, or sentimental, the poems are smart, insightful, and clear.The voice is consistent--even generous.Whether song or story, Hightower is at the top of his game in every poem!

Clean and deep hitting...
From an invocation to the muse and polio in the childhood landscape to Hightower's take on "Noli Me Tangere" to a meditation on Filicide (which I had to look up) and public execution.The poems in "Part of the Bargain" are clean and deep hitting.I loved every bit of it! ... Read more

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"Radio Crackling, Radio Gone"-- poetry by Lisa Olstein
Ms. Olstein sings the songs of angels with lyrics inspired, timeless and resonant. Deeply rooted in the earth and the nether world, she portrays the divinity of nature and humanity; indeed, of life itself. She more than deserves the Hayden Carruth Award. I expect to hear a lot more from this talented young poet. ... Read more

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Poetry. A COMMONPLACE BOOK OF PENTASTICHS is acompilation of 249 poems composed in a fine-line stanza form firstintroduced in THE SECRET ROOM (1997). It is the last book of his ownthat Laughlin helped to prepare. Musing on the full collection, HaydenCarruth writes in his introduction: "For the reader it is a survey ofliterature that will never be found in the classroom ... butindubitably will be found in loving longlasting proximity on many abedside table." James Laughlin founded New Directions in 1936. His ownfirst book, NATURAL THINGS, appeared nine years later. POEMS NEW ANDSELECTED, was completed shortly before hisdeath in 1997. ... Read more

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Pentastichs galore OR Reader's notes in five line form
A commonplace book is a sort of scholar's scrapbook in which to keep quotations etc. that you find useful.As a commonplace book this volume gives wonderful insight into Laughlin's reading/influence -
South Asian holy texts, Japanese novels, classical Latin and Greek texts ... a fascinating and varied collection.

These snapshots (as well as original entries) are in the form of pentastichs - a form Laughlin introduced in his The Secret Room: PoemsThis is a five line form, short lines, natural voice cadence.One has to wonder if extracting 5 lines from a pre-existing poem legitimately puts it in a new form.I suppose that since Laughlin created the rules ... More interesting to me in terms of form are the poems extracted from prose - a variety of "found poems".Here Lauglin's choice of line breaks and material gives a better sense of how Laughlin envisioned the form.Finally, the original poems show Laughlin, the poet, at work.Here we find several macronic verse (two languages are used), some very witty observations and some sage advice.

Delightful as the book is, recognising how much insight it gives into Laughlin's influences, I still have to wonder.If someone else extracted 5 line segments from others' works and used them as the mainstay of a book of poetry, could they get it published?

A remarkable work by a remarkable man who is an old friend.
I am no reviewer but thank you for asking.My name is Herb Slojewski.I've known Mr. Laughlin's work all my life.This is one of his finest books.Mr. L. was an admirer and supporter of Denise Levertov, who diedjust a short while ago.Don't miss this one, please.Thanks, Mr.Laughlin!Thank you very much.Herb.Thursday night.Eagle Rock,California 9.9.99--9:09 PM ... Read more

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More Lessons from the Master
W. H. Auden, in his introduction to 19th Century British Minor Poets, established five criteria for being major, of which a candidate must satisfy at least three and a half. The poet must be prolific, demonstrate "wide range in subject matter and treatment," evidence "originality of vision and style," show mastery of verse technique, and continue maturing as a poet until death. Hayden Carruth meets all these conditions, as his Collected Longer Poems demonstrates by itself; taken together with his Collected Shorter Poems (1992), it marks Carruth as a preeminent master. The poems were composed between 1957 and 1983 and have been published in various collections, only one previously unavailable except in a fine-press edition. Three are written in Carruth's trade-mark "paragraphs," rhymed, variably metered fifteen-line stanzas, including The Sleeping Beauty, the heart of Carruth's oeuvre to date. Other poems in the collection are written in sprawling Whitmanesque lines, tercets, free-verse lyrics, and loosened blank verse, the chosen form answering the demands of the subject matter. Few, if any, of Carruth's contemporaries--or immediate predecessors or followers--have demonstrated such extensive mastery.

An overlooked poet
This collection contains several of Carruth's longer poems, including "The Sleeping Beauty."I picked up this collection to read this poem in my studies and I was impressed.Carruth's poetry is interesting and sparks the imagination with his subtle and genuine style. ... Read more

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Perhaps Carruth's finest work.
Hayden Carruth, Brothers, I Loved You All (Faculty Press, 1978)

Why must it be such a truism that the best books of any relatively prolific poet must be published by small, out-of-the-way presses with no distribution? Bukowski's Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window, for example, or Lifshin's A New Film in Love with the Dead. Simic's Nine Poems, Cronshey's Afternoon in the Museum of Late Things. The whole catalog of Liz Willis. It's all brilliant and all impossibly hard to find.

Add Carruth's "wow"-inducing Brothers, I Loved You All, published by Faculty Press, to the list. Now almost impossible to find (though most of it can be found in Collected Shorter and Collected Longer, published in the early nineties by Copper Canyon and must-haves for any poetry fan), Brothers is one of the rarest birds to be found in all of poetry.

Poetry has long been considered a dying art form, and there are valid arguments to be made to that effect. Song has taken the province that poetry trod before it, and in all honesty does much of it better. But the solid image is still, for the most part, the exclusive province of poetry, save for a few surrealist novels and a handful of consistently amazing songwriters. The niche for poetry, since the time of Eliot and Williams, has been the image. (Would that more would-be poets understood this and stopped penning second-rate song lyrics. But I digress.) The poet who persists in formal poetry, or poetry that strays outside the bounds of image, is wading in a pool of hip-deep slime from which ninety-nine percent of poets fail to emerge at all. (Your current author is very much included in this, when he chooses to venture into such dangerous waters.) Of those who do, they may manage a few short pieces that manage to both take the narrative quality of earlier works and add to it the polish necessary to captivate today's reader of poetry, unutterably jaded after years of having schoolroom elephant dung shoved down their throats. A handful of poets are consistently fantastic at this. But very, very few after World War II would ever have even considered trying to do it with the long poem. Hayden Carruth has tried a number of times, usually with less than stellar results compared to his finest short work; in "Vermont," the centerpiece of Brothers, he has succeeded in such a way that, had he never written a single other word in his career that will be remembered, he has etched himself in the canon of American writers.

"Vermont" is an astounding piece of work that traverses history, politics, quirky personalities, the gradual paving of the state, and everything in between, the whole mess. Carruth switches voices as effortlessly as Rich Little roasting Mel Blanc, with subtle changes in diction to bring the whole thing off. Part formal, part free, "Vermont" is, quite simply, must reading for poets, aspiring poets, and poetry fans.

"...Why, hell, I knew a man
living in Coos Junction who wouldn't take
a twenty-dollar bill; he couldn't stand
to carry Andrew Jackson in his back pocket.
'Gimme two tens,' he said. 'Ain't it just like
them fathead red-tape artists? They design
the twenty for a red, then put a great man
like Hamilton on the tens...."

I have no illusions that reading "Vermont" will suddenly turn a nation with millions of wannabes for every real working poet into a nation of Carruths; most people are simply too dull, or too unschooled, to pick up the subtle differences between the brilliance that Carruth displays here and the random, unpoetic barkings of the "socially conscious" poets that never fail to land with such a dull thud. (I know. I've already tried to get them to read Carolyn Forche.) But at least they will have been exposed to such great brilliance. **** ½ ... Read more

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Inconsistent, but when it's good, it's very very good.
Hayden Carruth, Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Towards the Distant Islands (New Directions, 1990)

I was of the opinion for many years that Hayden Carruth was America's finest living poet. These days, he still ranks, but I often find him more frustrating than anything. He's always straddling the line between real poetry and that vague prose-broken-up-into-lines that is only poetry when maybe a tenth of a percent of writers dabble in it.

The first section of Tell Me Again is full of failed experiments in attempts at vagueness. Value-words, as opposed to images, abound. Not to say there aren't a few successes, but the majority of them are very much prose broken up into lines.

Then comes the second section, and all that goes away. One long poem on the death of his mother, Carruth retreats to where all good poets find their best work; the image. It would, for most people, be impossible to write a poem on such an event (especially one as long as this) without straying into the land of judgment and value, and to be sure, Carruth does on a number of occasions. But here, it works, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Maybe it's because the poem is so rooted in memories (which are, of course, naked image). "Mother" is another of those poems written that make Carruth sound as if he could do no wrong ("Ray," written soon after this, is another; it can be found in Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, and is must reading for any Carruth fan who's never had the pleasure). But rather than there really being a high pint of his career (if he had one, the late eighties and early nineties would be it), this seems another example of Carruth's ability to let fly with a real monster every once in a while, an ability that has stayed with him throughout his career, from the earliest books to the most recent.

Hayden Carruth is without doubt a fine author. Tell Me Again is a good book, certainly better than 99% of the books of poetry out there. But what makes is worth seeking out and buying is "Mother," the long poem that comprises the book's second section. A definite must-read. *** ½ ... Read more

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Originally published in 1911.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

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Frederick Hayden Carruth (1862- 1932) was an American author, editor and journalist. Born in Minnesota, he was the editor of the Women's Home Companion and was a prolific contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, the National Magazine, Harper's New Monthly Magazine and The Smart Set. His works include: Uncle Bentley and the Roosters (1873), The Adventures of Jones (1895) and The Voyage of the Rattletrap (1897). ... Read more