Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems

Hayden Carruth, Sam Hamill, ed.

This “portable Carruth,” edited and introduced by Sam Hamill, gathers the essential poems from a major American poet. Over his long and prolific career, Carruth has been one of the most rigorous and inventive technicians of a generation that will long be celebrated for its brilliance and variety. This volume presents lyrics and short and long narratives, as well as comic, meditative, and erotic poems, and reflections on the natural world. Ever engaged with radical politics, rural poverty, and the poet’s cultural responsibility, Carruth’s work is alive with a rare courage and clear-eyed conviction. Like the jazz he so loved, Carruth’s poetry ranges from the formal to the spontaneous, from local speech to righteous oratory, from sublime complexity to elegant understatement.

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Abandoned Ranch, Big Bend

Three people come where no people belong any more.
They are a woman who would be young
And good-looking if these now seemed
Real qualities, a child with yellow hair, a man
Hardened in desperate humanity. But here are only
Dry cistern, adobe flaking, a lizard. And now this
Disagreeable feeling that they were summoned. Sun
On the corrugated roof is a horse treading,
A horse with wide wings and heavy hoofs. The lizard
is splayed head down on the wall, pulsing. They do not
Bother to lift their binoculars to the shimmering distance.
From this dead center the desert spirals away,
Traveling outward and inward, pulsing. Summoned
From half across the world, from snow and rock,
From chaos, they arrived a moment ago, they thought,
In perfect fortuity. There is a presence emerging here in
Sun dance and clicking metal, where the lizard blinks
With eyes whetted for extinction; then swirling
Outward again, outward and upward through the sky’s
White-hot funnel. Again and again among the dry
Wailing voices of displaced Yankee ghosts
This ranch is abandoned to terror and the sublime.
The man turns to the woman and child. He has never
Said what he meant. They give him
The steady cool mercy of their unreproachful eyes.

About the Author

Hayden Carruth (1921–2008) lived for many years in northern Vermont, then moved to upstate New York, where he taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. He published twenty-four books of poetry, a novel, four books of criticism, and two anthologies. He served as the editor of Poetry, poetry editor of Harper’s, and for twenty-five years as an advisory editor of The Hudson Review. The Bollingen, Guggenheim, and Lannan Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for …

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About the Editor

Sam Hamill (1943–2018) grew up on a Utah farm. He was a founding editor of Copper Canyon Press and served as its editor for thirty-two years. He taught in artist-in-residency programs in schools and prisons and worked with domestic violence programs. He directed the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference for nine years, and in 2003 founded Poets Against the War. He was the author of more than forty books, including celebrated translations from ancient Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Latin. His most …

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Reviews

“For Carruth, ‘the poem is a gift, a bestowal,’ and the reader sees the fruits of that belief throughout Toward the Distant Islands… an extraordinary record of an extraordinary life in the second half of the 20th century.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Carruth’s long and protean career includes his editing of The Voice That Is Great Within Us (1970), a still-standard anthology of American modernism; a high-profile stint as editor of Poetry magazine; and periods of rural seclusion. His books encompass Frostian tales of farm life with New England eccentrics, compilations of haiku, long and unguarded poems of erotic devotion, autobiographical laments, and sensitive odes to jazz greats who understood that ‘Freedom and discipline occur / only in ecstasy, all else / is shoveling out the muck.’ All sides of Carruth’s oeuvre find a place in this welcome volume.” —Publishers Weekly

“As much as anyone’s, [Carruth’s] is a poetry of direct statement. The voice is one that can be trusted; it seems without guile or pretense.”—North Dakota Quarterly