The Government Lake bookcover

The Government Lake

Last Poems

James Tate 

(Author)
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
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Description

The stunning, startling collection that is also the last work from a major poet

A woman named Mildred starts laying eggs after feathers from wild poultry begin coming down the chimney. A man becomes friends with a bank robber who abducts him and eventually rues his captor’s death. A baby is born transparent.

James Tate’s work, filled with unexpected turns and deadpan exaggeration, “fanciful and grave, mundane and transcendent,” (New York Times) has been among the most defining and significant of our time. In his last collection before his death in 2015, Tate’s dark yet whimsical humor, his emotional acuity, and his keen ear for the absurd are on full display in prose poems that finely constructed and lyrical, surrealistic and provocative.

With The Government Lake, James Tate reminds us why he is one of the great poets of our age and one of the true masters of the form. 

Product Details

PublisherEcco
Publish DateJuly 02, 2019
Pages96
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconHardback
EAN/UPC9780062914712
Dimensions8.0 X 6.0 X 0.5 inches | 9.7 pounds

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.

Reviews

“The rare American poet who managed to make poems that were at once fanciful and grave, mundane and transcendent. . . . His work is singular in American poetry for marrying goofball humor and childish jouissance to a lyricism that never seems cheap or self-serious-an unusual achievement.” — New York Times Book Review

“James Tate never ceases to astonish, dismay, delight, confuse, tickle, and generally improve the quality of our lives.” — John Ashbery

“A poem out of nothing…is Tate’s genius…Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction.” — Charles Simic

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