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Shroud of the Gnome
Speakers in James Tate's poems are and are not like those we know: a man's meditation on gardening renders him witless; another man traps theories and then lets them loose in a city park; a nun confides that "it was her / cowboy pride that got her through"; a gnome's friend inhabits a world where "a great eschatological ferment is at work. "Shroud of the Gnome" is a bravura performance in Tate's signature style: playful, wicked, deliriously sober, charming, and dazzling. Here, once again, one of America's most masterful poets celebrates the inexplicable in his own strange tongue.
- GenresPoetry20th Century
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
4 people are currently reading
169 people want to read
About the author
James Tate
176 books129 followersJames Vincent Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University, and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he worked since 1971. He was a member of the poetry faculty at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers, along with Dara Wier and Peter Gizzi.
Dudley Fitts selected Tate's first book of poems, The Lost Pilot (1967) for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." Despite the early praise he received Tate alienated some of his fans in the seventies with a series of poetry collections that grew more and more strange.
He published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (2001) and The Route as Briefed (1999). His awards include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, a National Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was also a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Tate's writing style is difficult to describe, but has been identified with the postmodernist and neo-surrealist movements. He has been known to play with phrases culled from news items, history, anecdotes, or common speech; later cutting, pasting, and assembling such divergent material into tightly woven compositions that reveal bizarre and surreal insights into the absurdity of human nature.
Dudley Fitts selected Tate's first book of poems, The Lost Pilot (1967) for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." Despite the early praise he received Tate alienated some of his fans in the seventies with a series of poetry collections that grew more and more strange.
He published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (2001) and The Route as Briefed (1999). His awards include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, a National Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was also a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Tate's writing style is difficult to describe, but has been identified with the postmodernist and neo-surrealist movements. He has been known to play with phrases culled from news items, history, anecdotes, or common speech; later cutting, pasting, and assembling such divergent material into tightly woven compositions that reveal bizarre and surreal insights into the absurdity of human nature.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
December 20, 2019
Rae asked me what I was reading and I waved this book up in the air, Shroud of the Gnome. She started laughing. What? What’s so funny about a discarded library book from Chicago with Gnome in the title? Yes, it’s heavily laminated, and stamped 100 times DISCARD!! What?
James Tate is really great and I didn’t just take the time to say that because it rhymes. Send review. That’s a wrap, guys.
James Tate is really great and I didn’t just take the time to say that because it rhymes. Send review. That’s a wrap, guys.
March 29, 2016
I thought this collection would be more about gnomes but it's mostly about random people doing and saying odd things, which is basically Tate poetry. The standout poems for me: "Where Babies Come From;" "The Definition of Gardening;" "Acupuncture;" "The Faults of the Mariner's Compass;" "Revenge of the Jagged Ambush Bug; and "Think of Your Absent Friend."
February 22, 2019
Though I love much of the imagery and humor, many of these poems, to me, are closer to nonsensical than surreal. This is the first collection of his I’ve read. I’ll definitely be reading others—my two library systems have at least a dozen of them.
Highlights: ‘Never Again the Same’ (brilliant!); ‘The Definition of Gardening’; ‘And That’s the Good News’; ‘Smart’; ‘The Sleeping Disorder Tour’.
Never Again the Same
Speaking of sunsets,
last night's was shocking.
I mean, sunsets aren't supposed to frighten you, are
they?
Well, this one was terrifying.
People were screaming in the streets.
Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.
It wasn't natural.
One climax followed another and then another
until your knees went weak
and you couldn't breathe.
The colors were definitely not of this world,
peaches dripping opium,
pandemonium of tangerines,
inferno of irises,
Plutonian emeralds,
all swirling and churning, swabbing,
like it was playing with us,
like we were nothing,
as if our whole lives were a preparation for this,
this for which nothing could have prepared us
and for which we could not have been less prepared.
The mockery of it all stung us bitterly.
And when it was finally over
we whimpered and cried and howled.
And then the streetlights came on as always
and we looked into one another's eyes—
ancient caves with still pools
and those little transparent fish
who have never seen even one ray of light.
And the calm that returned to us
was not even our own.
Excerpt:
from ‘And That’s the Good News’:
We were like two ping-pong balls
floating, adrift,
in a bathtub of black ink.
Highlights: ‘Never Again the Same’ (brilliant!); ‘The Definition of Gardening’; ‘And That’s the Good News’; ‘Smart’; ‘The Sleeping Disorder Tour’.
Never Again the Same
Speaking of sunsets,
last night's was shocking.
I mean, sunsets aren't supposed to frighten you, are
they?
Well, this one was terrifying.
People were screaming in the streets.
Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.
It wasn't natural.
One climax followed another and then another
until your knees went weak
and you couldn't breathe.
The colors were definitely not of this world,
peaches dripping opium,
pandemonium of tangerines,
inferno of irises,
Plutonian emeralds,
all swirling and churning, swabbing,
like it was playing with us,
like we were nothing,
as if our whole lives were a preparation for this,
this for which nothing could have prepared us
and for which we could not have been less prepared.
The mockery of it all stung us bitterly.
And when it was finally over
we whimpered and cried and howled.
And then the streetlights came on as always
and we looked into one another's eyes—
ancient caves with still pools
and those little transparent fish
who have never seen even one ray of light.
And the calm that returned to us
was not even our own.
Excerpt:
from ‘And That’s the Good News’:
We were like two ping-pong balls
floating, adrift,
in a bathtub of black ink.
May 13, 2009
Some people go their whole lives without ever writing a single poem...
December 27, 2025
Certainly not for every taste. The book is filled with beautiful and/or fascinating lines, and the poetic work is evident. And it 'almost' makes sense! As a reader you try to create connections, form a logical narrative. But it's just not there. To some degree, that does not matter. In all poetry that which flings you into your subconsciousness, into alternate connections and synaptic leaps, is one of the goals. In that respect, Tate certainly succeeds.
In another respect, it's like being a chemist peering through a microscope and seeing all your favorite enzymes floating around the slide only they do not connect, react, or do what the laws of chemistry propel them to do. They're there, and you must make sense of them.
In another respect, it's like being a chemist peering through a microscope and seeing all your favorite enzymes floating around the slide only they do not connect, react, or do what the laws of chemistry propel them to do. They're there, and you must make sense of them.
April 13, 2021
Ya know you can't strike gold every time. I have enjoyed some of his other books much more and I guess some of these poems weren't as memorable. Still a suggestible collection, perhaps even for the uninitiated.
May 3, 2022
Great book.
April 15, 2025
Anything can happen in a James Tate poem and often does. A real pleasure to read aloud and laugh out loud when the detours are just right.
April 17, 2024
Moments of great clarity inhabited me,
I was their anthill and they were my ants.
I was their anthill and they were my ants.
July 17, 2015
In 1965, James Tate road-tripped from Kansas to Iowa City and offered Donald Justice a dozen or so poems to judge, opening up a fount of hyperbole and high keyed hilarity in our literature. Within six years, Tate had published six books, several quite substantial, and tempered his scale of loose talking to the automatic procedures of European modernism, including Eliotic impersonality. A period of adjustment toward the prose poem marks his Eighties, culminating in The Worshipful Company of Fletchers(1994), which right now is striking me as his best book.
The Shroud of Gnome is not that, but the shrewd literary professional is apparent in lines such as these, from "School of Paddling": "We had traveled a great distance | and no one would speak to us| so we just sat there on the shore | and threw stones at stones | which led to the accidental erection | of a cairn, whose significance | we considered iffy at best." The professionalism is here -- from the unpunctuated lines to the droll joke on contemporary hermeneutics, to the "iffy" take that a Tate poem is just such a cairn. But so is the situation (on a shore), the impersonality, and the disjunction of the earlier period of Tate's pastoral surrealism, here transmuted in an effortless guile that reads much differently when it was the bluff of the ephebe. That prairie bluff entails "the embarrassing heartache of my latest apercu," and yet, for this persona, "It is a mystery to me, along with | so much better rubbish, | the trash people are eager to kill for." This poem of domestic bliss, "Of Two or Three Minds," has in its close Ashbery's "By the Flooded Canal" on its ear, and so apologizes for the shrewdness of that judgment, but by then Tate was ensconced at Amherst, where the Boston literary scene presumably calls up a homicidal dumpster-diver or two.
Tate's great poem about the orders of poetry is collected here, "Dream On," which opens, "Some people go their whole lives | without ever writing a single poem." The next time poetry comes up in the poem, it's when the speaker says: "[These poem-less folk] contribute to political campaigns | that have absolutely no poetry in them," and as a friend pointed out to me, if the reader simply substituted, in their reading of "Dream On," "love" for "poetry," "Dream On" could clearly enough be a religious poem of a certain Christ-centered kind. This remark led me to understand that Tate was writing about the orders of poetry. In an order, one takes vows, and Tate's poem is about the vows poets take. The domestic bliss pictured at the close of "Of Two or Three Minds," is of lovers who offer within the house the humors or inflationary space that makes possible staying within one's poetry vows. Keep in mind that Tate loves poetry, and that the orders of that love have made it so that Tate experiences everything in the world (the great world, as he would have seen it) through poetry's lens. It is a social order he can be quite wry about -- and is, in this volume: "Per Diem," e.g., is Tate's parody of James Wright's "To A Blossoming Pear Tree." It doesn't call Wright out by name, but only in rhythm, and through imitation. And the book is thoroughly Thoreauvian, nowhere more than "Think of Your Absent Friend," a poem on the same theme as Thoreau's "Walking."
The Shroud of Gnome is not that, but the shrewd literary professional is apparent in lines such as these, from "School of Paddling": "We had traveled a great distance | and no one would speak to us| so we just sat there on the shore | and threw stones at stones | which led to the accidental erection | of a cairn, whose significance | we considered iffy at best." The professionalism is here -- from the unpunctuated lines to the droll joke on contemporary hermeneutics, to the "iffy" take that a Tate poem is just such a cairn. But so is the situation (on a shore), the impersonality, and the disjunction of the earlier period of Tate's pastoral surrealism, here transmuted in an effortless guile that reads much differently when it was the bluff of the ephebe. That prairie bluff entails "the embarrassing heartache of my latest apercu," and yet, for this persona, "It is a mystery to me, along with | so much better rubbish, | the trash people are eager to kill for." This poem of domestic bliss, "Of Two or Three Minds," has in its close Ashbery's "By the Flooded Canal" on its ear, and so apologizes for the shrewdness of that judgment, but by then Tate was ensconced at Amherst, where the Boston literary scene presumably calls up a homicidal dumpster-diver or two.
Tate's great poem about the orders of poetry is collected here, "Dream On," which opens, "Some people go their whole lives | without ever writing a single poem." The next time poetry comes up in the poem, it's when the speaker says: "[These poem-less folk] contribute to political campaigns | that have absolutely no poetry in them," and as a friend pointed out to me, if the reader simply substituted, in their reading of "Dream On," "love" for "poetry," "Dream On" could clearly enough be a religious poem of a certain Christ-centered kind. This remark led me to understand that Tate was writing about the orders of poetry. In an order, one takes vows, and Tate's poem is about the vows poets take. The domestic bliss pictured at the close of "Of Two or Three Minds," is of lovers who offer within the house the humors or inflationary space that makes possible staying within one's poetry vows. Keep in mind that Tate loves poetry, and that the orders of that love have made it so that Tate experiences everything in the world (the great world, as he would have seen it) through poetry's lens. It is a social order he can be quite wry about -- and is, in this volume: "Per Diem," e.g., is Tate's parody of James Wright's "To A Blossoming Pear Tree." It doesn't call Wright out by name, but only in rhythm, and through imitation. And the book is thoroughly Thoreauvian, nowhere more than "Think of Your Absent Friend," a poem on the same theme as Thoreau's "Walking."
May 13, 2015
He's obviously talented and the images he conveys here are fascinating and so imaginative, but I just didn't seem to get much out of this collection. It was wonderfully written, but the meanings were forgettable, if reachable at all to begin with. "Dream On" and "Different Kinds of Embroidery" were my favorites and definitely worth reading. Oh, and "Acupuncture"!
May 13, 2010
Disappointing. The book reviewer who wrote this up in the Times did a great job (or maybe a misleading job?) of cherry picking the best lines from this to make it look mind blowing. But for me the pieces as a whole are too fluffy and don't really grow. I still want to read his earlier books.
August 30, 2016
This is the kind of poetry that validates people saying they don't like poetry because they can't understand it. I love poetry, but this is the kind of poetry that is too close to the absurd for my taste. I need a little more grounding in realism for me to really get/enjoy it.
Yuck.
Yuck.
January 22, 2008
My favorite book of poetry for I don't know how long.
June 9, 2008
As a writer exploring the realms of the prose poem, I thought I'd investigate one of the best in the genre: James Tate.
August 12, 2008
I lost this book on the red line inbound from Braintree. This was probably three years ago now. I hope someone enjoyed it as much as I did.
July 10, 2010
I have this one at home
February 7, 2011
Wonderful. I love James Tate's sense of humor and wordplay. Excellent read!
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February 1, 2013811.54 T216s 1997
October 14, 2014
fascinating and original
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews