Worshipful Company of Fletchers

the long version

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. The book covers a vast range of images; a child's shoe in the road, a word on the kitchen counter "next to the pitcher of cream/with its blue cornflowers bent," "a city whose citizens...did not live in any one place/but roamed the boulevards and alleyways/picking up gumwrapppers and setting them down again," a woman leading a bumblebee "as big as a Saint Bernard," a retired eland that "watches television from early morning until late at night." But each image can exist only in the context of its poem, where it becomes something greater, where it underlines - together with other equally brilliant and eccentric images - all that is elusive about human experience.