Hayden Carruth Selected Works

Hayden Carruth's From Snow and Rock, from Chaos—his first book since For You (1970)—contains a selection of his best short poems written between 1965 and 1972. Once again, the setting for many of the pieces is the Green Mountains of Vermont, where the poet and his family have lived for several years.

Hayden Carruth's Last Poems is a triumph—a morally engaged, tender, and fearless volume that combines the last poems of his life with the concluding poems from each of his previous volumes. Introduced by Stephen Dobyns, Last Poems is a moving tribute to a towering and beloved figure in American poetry.

This “portable Carruth” gathers new poems with the essential works from a major American poet. Included are lyrics, short narratives, comic, meditative, and erotic poems that engage politics, music, rural poverty, and the cultural responsibility of artists.

The poet Jane Kenyon earned wide acclaim for her clear, vivid, deeply spiritual lyrics, many of them written in the face of her own mortality. During the year of her dying, Hayden Carruth's faithful correspondence, collected here, gives us rare insight into the inner life of a major poet as he confronts the loss of a dear friend. Kind, consoling, passionate, and at times wickedly funny, these letters transcend the personal, offering an extended meditation on age and death, and on the art of poetry.

For three decades Hayden Carruth has been one of America's most intelligent and significant poets and critics. The essays and reviews in this book are a selective representation of his critical writing.

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.

Winner of the National Book Award. With passion and pathos and great good humor—in poems that could only be written by a mature poet at the height of his powers—Carruth speaks with intimate and urgent clarity of love late in life. In heart-rending poems he addresses his daughter's struggle against cancer, as well as the loves, friendships, and social concerns of a lifetime.

These essays on poetry by one of the foremost poet-critics of our time reveal a lifelong dedication to social radicalism and cultural responsibility and to the profound conviction that poetry is a path to enlightenment.