Hell, I Love James Tate

In 1991, the American poet James Tate published his first Selected Poems – editing his just-over-twenty-year career down to c.250 pages and making the literati take stock of just how significant his work had been. For his signature tragi-comic voice, wordplay, and often fun-loving (if serious) sense of self-discovery, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award. Twenty years later, Tate edited his second selected, The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990–2010, where we get to see how his early short-lined tercets had evolved into sprawling prose-like narratives (explained by Tate in a Paris Review interview as the result of him writing a poem in the morning and editing it in the afternoon).

With two books of selected poems already covering the bulk of his career, the reader of this review might be wondering why we need a third in Hell, I Love Everybody, and a short third at that. The answer is pretty simple: because since Tate’s death in 2015, he has been supremely missed. Editors – Dara Barrois/Dixon, Emily Pettit and Kate Lindroos – have done the hard slog of selecting only fifty-two poems from Tate’s eighteen full-length collections of poetry (some of the late hovering around 200 pages themselves), ‘to make an intimate book’. This strategy of extreme selection is a winning one, in part thanks to their inspired decision to not chronologically order the poetry via publication date, and so to show how Tate’s poems speak to each other over his five- ...