The poems [in Viper Jazz by] … James Tate occupy the tenuous borderland between nonsense and disaster. Whether he is spoofing a cosmic ultimatum … or blowing up a microcosmic annoyance …, his poems, like Halloween masks, elicit a double response. Do we laugh or cry?

Tate is concerned with everything from alienation to ecological mismanagement, from exploitation to automation. His keen awareness of the unfitness of things shows up in his absurd handling of language….

Traditionally, absurdist art is accused of lacking seriousness. Like his contemporaries in the world of wackiness, Vonnegut and Barthelme, Tate often allows his fascination with ideas to carry him further than anyone wants to go….

Still, there is a fine blend of lightness and sadness that plays across the face of these poems, a comic sense of the "tears of things" that prompts us to say, as Kent said of the songs and riddles of...