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...

James Tate's Torches was a complete disappointment, which at first just irritated and then angered me. It seemed as if Tate had gathered up unused images, put them into a machine, and ground out poems like inferior sausages. Any poet has a fondness for his weak poems, but this is no excuse for finding them comfortable homes. They should be strangled, and the poet should move on. I'm sure I wouldn't have been so disappointed if I hadn't read Tate before. The book has a few good po...

James Tate's … [Riven Doggeries] contains few surprises, is thoroughly in the mode of his increasingly extravagant previous work …, and [from the start of the title poem] we are off and running into an art which not only resists paraphrase but actively cultivates the resistance. Tate's practice is nowhere less than professional, his manner always self-assured even when (as is usually the case) not much of a future for the self is seen…. (p. 295) Tate is not one to stay aro...

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….

[The] poet, and this I think applies to James Tate, can slip into a private world where his unique juxtapositions and fresh imagery are often meaningless to the reader…. There is no way the poet can judge the potential of his imagery except in relation to other elements of the poem. And here is the main problem I find with Tate's poetry [in Viper Jazz]; for he works with startling phrases and uncommon imagery almost exclusively. If they don't work there's little else in the poem ...

Tate has been visible as a poet so long … that one is dismayed to find him still stuck in adolescence [with the poems in Riven Doggeries]. The silliness, defiance of "authority," high spirits, blurted obscenities, and puerile cleverness of his poetry are perhaps confused, by some, with spunky American originality…. What might save Tate for poetry? Perhaps doses of Indian poems …, for at moments Tate already writes in their happy animistic spirit…. But unlike, say, t...

Nothing at all controls James Tate's choice of metaphors, similes, images, or statements in his new book of poetry. The title poem, "Riven Doggeries," reads like a page from the comics…. Like verbal doodling, whatever pops into the poet's mind crops up in the poem. Tate has a fine ear for inane colloquialisms and absurd figures of speech, but this volume is a far cry from the austere beauty of Absences and its probing of the Self. Perhaps success, which gives even the most...

Missing, from ["Notes of Woe"], is the kind of emotional directness found in the title poem of Tate's first collection, "The Lost Pilot." More in evidence is this young poet's great virtuosity. In consequence, the book is flawed. The desperation here (as reflected in the title, from Blake) is not always convincing: it has too much style. The reader is fascinated by what Tate can do with language, but the poems too often just remain on that level. Nevertheless, there...

Tate's [Riven Doggeries] is disturbingly defensive. The central characteristic of these poems is their impenetrability, at best ordering experience through savage parodies, wordplay, and grotesque wit; at worst assaulting the reader and denying any kind of meaning, linguistic or existential. In this extreme form of expressionism, neither narrative nor visual logic is possible; incoherence and solipsism are the rule. Futility of action, failure of love, and lack of spiritual comfort form depressing th...