This famous anthology includes the works of more than 130 major American poets of the modern period--Robert Frost, Paul Goodman, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gwendolyn Brooks among them--along with short biographies of each.

Not only the best on its period, I think, but is even perhaps safe from the competition of rivals.--Robert Lowell

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Hayden Carruth is a major literary figure and no survey of American poetry is complete without inclusion of his work.

In this newest book of poems--the first since his 1996 National Book Award--Carruth confronts the threadbare memories of old age and the fading winter view. From the bleakest circumstances--the death of his daughter, physical and mental pain, poverty--Carruth defiantly reclaims dignity and beauty. His poetry is at once classical and modern. With the spit and bop of a great jazzman playing all the right notes, Carruth lives his music, finding the perfect low tones of terrible loss, the highs of family and friendship. Yet he is also the wise old sage of classical Greece, warning, riddling, giving generous counsel and insight.

At Seventy-Five: Rereading an Old Book

My prayers have been answered, if they were prayers. I live.
I'm alive, and even in rather good health, I believe.
If I'd quit smoking I might live to be a hundred.
Truly this is astonishing, after the poverty and pain,
The suffering. Who would have thought that petty
Endurance could achieve so much?
And prayers--
Were they prayers? Always I was adamant
In my irreligion, and had good reason to be.
Yet prayer is not, I see in old age now,
A matter of doctrine or discipline, but rather
A movement of the natural human mind
Bereft of its place among the animals, the other
Animals. I prayed. Then on paper I wrote
Some of the words I said, which are these poems.

Hayden Carruth has won nearly every major award in poetry, including the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's circle Award. He is the author of 24 previous books of poetry and prose. He lives in Munnsville, NY.

Jane Kenyon, who was married to the poet Donald Hall, earned wide acclaim for her clear, vivid, deeply spiritual lyrics, many of them written in the face of her own -mortality.

During the year of her dying, Carruth's faithful correspondence, collected here, is a testament to the depth of their friendship, and a rare window into the inner life of a major poet as he confronts the loss of a dear friend. Both Carruth and Kenyon have devoted followings; Letters to Jane offers unique and personal new insight into their poetry.

Of this book, Francine Prose has written, Reading these beautiful, eloquent, moving letters from one poet to another, you keep forgetting (as you are meant to) even as, paradoxically, it never leaves your mind for a moment, that this is no casual correspondence. Its occasion is urgent and extraordinary. The recipient is dying.

. . . Carruth writes again and again--honest, direct, affectionate accounts of everyday events: writing and reading, visiting friends, traveling to give poetry readings, enjoying good moods and good health, enduring physical and emotional setbacks, feeding the dog and watching bee balm bloom in the garden.

What's most mysterious and marvelous about these letters--which end around the time of Kenyon's death in 1995--is how they manage to be, simultaneously, so relaxed and so intense, so concrete and so reflective, and how every word and every sentence reminds us of the preciousness of ordinary life, and of the enduring and -sustaining consolations of friendship.

Hayden Carruth is the author of more than 20 books, predominantly poetry. His work has been awarded many honors, including the National Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Whiting Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He has also written widely on jazz and the blues. He lives in Munnsville, NY.

This portable Carruth gathers the essential poems from a major American poet. Toward the Distant Islands presents lyrics, short and long narratives, comic, meditative, 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. Over his prolific and celebrated writing career, Hayden Carruth has been one of the most rigorous and inventive technicians of a generation that has been acknowledged for its brilliance and variety. Like the jazz he so loves, his poetry ranges from the formal to the spontaneous, from local speech to righteous oratory, from sublime complexity to elegant understatement. This volume features an introduction by Carruth's longtime friend and editor, Sam Hamill.