It is a critical commonplace that, in contrast to earlier generations of American poets, no poet born during or after World War II has yet emerged to bridge the gap between "academic" and "experimental" poetry. Although some may celebrate the...

During the relatively few years of his public poetic career--from the small-press publication of Cages in 1966 to the appearance of Riven Doggeries (1979) as number eighteen in the prestigious American Poetry Series--James Tate has produced more than...

FEW ROYAL PERSONAGES HAVE been subjected to such sustained and vicious pictorial assault as the man who was known variously as Prince of Wales, Prince Regent, and finally George IV. He was the subject of hundreds of caricatures, many scurrilous and obscene, displayed...

An occasional listing of works by area authors and/or of particular local interest. James Tate "is at his superb best in this dazzling new collection," John Ashbery has said of the poet's ninth book, "Reckoner" (Wesleyan University Press, $17; $8.95 paperback). It comprises...

The Detroit Police Department says its effort to reduce police brutality and other abuses has been so expensive that it now wants a federal court to lighten up on its oversight.The U.S. attorney said he would oppose the move.The city in 2003 pledged to make...

A 17-year-old former employee of a downtown sports bar owned by the Detroit Red Wings' Chris Chelios was arrested in the stabbing deaths of the restaurant's manager and a cook.The bodies of Cheli's Chili Bar manager Megan Soroka, 49, of Dearborn, and cook Mark Barnard,...

Riven Doggeries is James Tate's most accessible book since his first, The Lost Pilot, but not necessarily his best. Absences still moves me more than anything else he's written. In it he retains elements of despair, anger, rage: it is surrealism with a razor-edge and transcends the boundaries of any ism. By comparison Riven Doggeries is surrealism with a dacquiri…. Tate's way to the sublime is through the ridiculous because, for him, the sublime is ridiculous. His struggle has be...

James Tate is a poet of fine intuitive intelligence. His quick-hit/near-miss use of the poetic punch line has led him into wider imaginative territory and more cul-de-sacs than any other poet of his generation. His risks are a vital part of the take. That is why, for a lot of readers, Tate presents problems. He is a genius of the double take, double-think, whether it is humor needling despair or platitude succumbing to perception. He can edit an experience down to its most evocative chord…. But Tate ...

The allegiance James Tate announced in The Lost Pilot, his first book, was to a surrealism that would inform and interpret the familiar. In his subsequent work, though that early pledge has not been forsworn, there has appeared with increasing frequency an acknowledgment of failure, a suggestion that nothing, not even surrealism, will work as a method any longer, even that language, or communication its bastard son, has become impossible…. It is typical of Tate's perversity that he defines abs...