Memoir of the Hawk by James Tate

Memoir of the Hawk Reviews

• 
  Caspar Bryant

  
  
  I love him how does somebody have this kind of brain this imagination good lord we need more James Tate visibility in the UK it's not fair the US is keeping him all to itself
  
  This is so good I want a calendar of JT poem-per-day what a craftsman a mind
  
  I find Tate almost impossible to annotate - there's no way of extricating specific lines it's such an entire time. My JTs so far are essentially blank I just let it wash
• 
  Gabriel Congdon

  Man, that Tate guy.
  
  
  Anti-poetry by any other claim.
  
  Function of poetry, Captain Obvious here, is that we connect with a line. This does away with the noxious idea that life is subjective and we’re all islands in Humanity peninsula. Which I always though was a bankrupt notion. Tate does the opposite. Less invisible castles and more monstrous pillow forts, where a real pillow war is ragging. Sometimes you can discern the allegory and sometimes the allegory aint there.
  
  It’s like…well, I’ll just do a bad impression of one of these bad boys. It’ll be crude, but fun for me.
  
  
  Not Made of Cheese
  
  My wife the astronaut came home from work, the moon. “How was the moon this time? Still devoid of anything educational?” I asked. “Oh we leaned a lot, just nothing that would sell Readers Digests.” She said. I’d been off Digests for four months now so I thought it was in poor taste that she would take to that wound. “Did you close that deal at the firm” she asked. “Oh, I closed that sucker. It’s open for naught ere-more.” I lied. It was still open cause I hand’t closed it. I just wanted to bring back some moon cheese myself, even if it was in lie form. We ate a dinner of nothing but cheese to which she said nothing. Later that week at the firm a man came in selling asteroids. He had a briefcase of volcanic-black fragments with more edges than rocks ought. “Have any of these been to the moon.” I asked. “This one has. It hit the moon, recouped for a bit, then hopped back up for earth. It’s got moon dust on it galore.” He said. I bought it and some flowers from a sarcastic florist and set my gatherings on the family room table that really shouldn’t be there and has no function other than upsetting feng shui. When my wife came home and regarded the flowers and the meteorite and said, “We played a pick up game of softball, and I swore I hit a rock just like this. It was a home run on moon accounts.” We looked at it, then at each other, then at all the other objects within eyesight. They all seemed like they were shot here from some pickup game of the beyond, perhaps us too.
  
• 
  Tony

  James Tate is one strange dude. His poems are peculiarly surreal, or magic realist, or merely absurd, and they seek out a place where humor meets dream. Check out this one:
  
  
  New Blood
  
  A huge lizard was discovered drinking
  out of the fountain today. It was not menacing
  anyone, it was just very thirsty. A small crowd
  gathered and whispered to one another, as though
  the lizard would understand them if they spoke
  in normal voices. The lizard seemed not even
  a little perturbed by their gathering. It drank
  and drank, its long forked tongue was like a red
  river hypnotizing the people, keeping them in a
  trance-like state. "It's like a different town,"
  one of them whispered. "Change is good," the
  other one whispered back.
  
  
• 
  Eryk

  Ideally, for me, at least, this book--along with his others--would be better read at the rate of one poem per day. Even the shortest Tate piece is immense and needs time to settle in. But with one poem per page in this 175 page book, I'd never be able to contain myself to only one a day. So, instead, I did the next best thing: read it in two days! This is a magnificent offering from Tate. The poems here are perhaps a bit shorter than those in some of his other books. Not a bad thing, by any means, as length means nothing to Tate or, say, Russell Edson. My favorites are: Carl's Shoes, The New Love Slave, and Duel To The Death. And the best part of this whole book?: The handwritten signature of James Tate, himself, on the title page!
• 
  Blake Williams

  I know I happen upon good poetry when I want to read it again and again and muse over the words like drinking wine slowly.
  
  
  
  What an awesome book of poems by a poet I've only just found out about.  I really love how absurd the small vignettes often are but often how quietly sad some of them are.  Tate may seem otherworldly or even obfuscating in his work, but I think he's being extremely specific. I loved quite a few of them, and they left lasting impressions.  One in particular "Like a Manta Ray" really spoke to me as tapping into the kind of irrational and rational ways of impulsivity.  The speaker steals pearls from the bottom of a pool. As he remarks, he doesn't need them or want them, but he doesn't want the owner to have them either.   There is something so brutally true about this.  Sometimes we're vindictive, even to strangers for reason we create, and the poem hones in on that.
  
  
  
  Also, "Negative Employee Situation" is really something special.  An exaggerated perversion of superstition, and how it ends with them scheming to kill the new Mary is delightful.
  
  
  
  Love this poet.  Can't wait to read more.
• 
  Joshua Buhs

  Not great. But ifvread in short bursts--so the repeated technique doesn't become wearying nor the lack of rigor annoying--these show how dynamic poetry can be. Straightforward until their surrealistic. Full of heart and grit. Occasionally magical.
• 
  Benjamin Niespodziany

  One of my very favorite books. Regardless of genre. Recently re-read and wow, what a joy.
• 
  Jeff

  Second Ecco volume (in the second Ecco phase) is 175 pp. so say Tate wrote 250 days a year. The next book was 2004. He'd need about a year and a half for a 50% yield.
• 
  Wayne

  Like a strange, surreal Spoon River Anthology, Tate's 'Memoir of the Hawk' captures the strange small town lives of a large cast of quirky characters. A fun read...
• 
  Mollie Pettit

  I am not a person who would normally sit down to read poetry. James Tate is my one exception. Each poem is like it's own quirky story. I've re-read this book more times than I can count. <3
• 
  edmondegreen

  Look. I love Tate. That's all I can say. I haven't encountered a miss yet.
• 
  Doc

  Funny, thoughtful, even insightful snippets of situations but read more as flash fiction miniatures than as poems. If this is what contemporary verse has become, then it is high time for the pendulum to swing back to more formal and disciplined modes. Oh, it is entertaining and worthwhile, but Mr. Tate is not only playing without the net but has eschewed the ball and racquet, and if you were expecting a tennis match, you got instead interpretive dance.
• 
  Jan

  Clever, sort of like Frank O'Hara, who isn't my cup of tea, either. The poems were written in verse, but with seemingly arbitrary line breaks, and they felt more like prose poems because of their surreal and absurd quality. The next morning, any magazine I picked up reminded me of Memoir of the Hawk, so I guess Tate succeeded in pointing out the absurdity of everyday life.
• 
  Darren

  Tate has a wonderful way of surprising. His poems are simple, for a while, but the epiphanies toward the end among the everyday events and relationships he concocts leave the reader with a sense of the surreal, of the fantastic...
• 
  Sharma

  I've been re-reading this collection of late and it kicks a severe amount of ass. Hilarious, eyebrow-raising, lyrical, completely paradoxical. Highly recommend to anyone wanting to read mind-blowing poetry.
• 
  Reacher

  with roughly 170 poems in this book, there are inevitably going to be some duds along with great poems, and that's surely the case here. one wonders if the collection would have been made stronger through more judicious selection.
• 
  Cole

  one of the best gifts i have ever received. thank you leroy.
• 
  Erin

  A few definitely stood out, others more lackluster.
• 
  Clark

  He's no Garrison Keillor! Hahahahahaha!
• 
  anon

  
  http://www.5cense.com/16/473.htm