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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780818015441
ISBN: 0818015446
Label: Sheep Meadow
Manufacturer: Sheep Meadow
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 110
Publication Date: 1978-12-01
Publisher: Sheep Meadow
Studio: Sheep Meadow

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Perhaps Carruth's finest work.
Review: 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

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