"For at least two decades Hayden Carruth has been a poet of the first quality... a writer so well endowed with character, courage, stamina, honesty, and independence as to make whatever styles he has adopted or adapted peculiarly his own." - R.W. Flint, Parnassus

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book collects five long poems that have previously appeared, with one exception, only in magazines and limited editions. One critic has called them "virtually secret." Yet they are probably the heart of Carruth's poetic achievement, both technically and thematically. Rising from the experiene of emotional illness and the asylum, the poems move at intervals and over a period of nearly fifteen years toward a sustained, workable view of humanity in crisis. "I have tried to create," Carruth writes, "specifically a seeing, living, surmounting person. Modesty is important, and so are winter and the north. A man alone in the snow is still much in this world, including the social world, though his 'in-ness' is naturally a form of rebellion." The poems included are "The Asylum," Journey to a Known Place," "North Winter," "Contra Mortem," and "My Father's Face."

For fifty years, Hayden Carruth's poetry has been distinguished by the indelible presence of passion, compassion, and radical philosophy. Collected Longer Poems gathers the poet's choice of his narrative work and poems in sequence, including his epic on the nature of romance, "The Sleeping Beauty," and meditative poems on the rural northeast that have made him the most accessible regional poet since Robert Frost. Our pre-eminent poet of improvisation within form, Carruth's renowned technical genius is perfectly matched to his ear for spoken language and narrative structure. By turns caustic and hilarious, his observations of that life, his own and his neighbors', ring as true as his ear for native speech. Collected Longer Poems completes the two-volume Collected Poems begun with the publication of Collected Shorter Poems in 1992, a volume that was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.