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."
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."
Hayden Carruth's epic meditation on the nature of Romance draws on the tradition born with the 13th century troubadours, examining that tradition through an enlightened perspective. Praising the initial publication in 1982, Carolyn Kizer wrote, "For twenty years Hayden Carruth has been one of our finest poets, as well as a superb critic of poetry." Now she adds, "The poem is unique in its understanding of the link between love of woman and love of nature. Those two great contemporary issues, recognition of women, and respect for our fragile world, are bound together in profound unity." To this revised edition, the poet has added a new canto and clarified others. Our pre-eminent poet of improvisation within form, Carruth's renowned technical genius explores a fifteen-line, approximate pentameter form of the poet's invention, constantly calling in people connected to the letter H, from Hesiod, Homer and Hesse, to Herr Husband, Householder and Handyman, finding resonance in all our comic tragedies, personal or mythic.
