Hayden Carruth Selected Works

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.

This collection of essays and poems about the influence of jazz on writing and culture in this country, an expanded edition of the 1986 publication, is a rewarding volume for all those entranced by jazz. Carruth brings his considerable poetic and literary sensibilities to bear on a topic very near to his heart: "Those who are devoted primarily to jazz, to poetry, to all the arts, are also those who contribute more intelligently than others to our practical and moral, political and social, advancement."

Musings and revelations about poetry, jazz, and the rocky course of one poet's life.

"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

Carruth's first poetry collection.

Effluences from the Sacred Caves is a collection of essays and reviews by one of America's foremost poets, essayists, and jazz aficionados.

This long-awaited book is the first collected edition of Carruth's work. Edited and introduced by poet Galway Kinnell, it offers thirty-three years of poetry that exhibits the qualities Alastair Reid cited in Saturday Review when Carruth won the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize for Brothers, I Loved You All: "Richness and variety...burly energy...courage and gusto...His work teems with the struggle to live and to make sense, and his poems carve out a kind of grace for us."