James Tate

The Best American Poetry 1997, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor James Tate. Wikipedia

This atmospheric thriller is perfect for fans of Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson A holiday weekend is ruined by a drowning in a picturesque village. The incident not only traumatizes Detective Cooper, a helpless witness to the tragedy, but leads him to become involved in the tangled lives of the victim's family. As he gets to know them, Cooper begins to suspect that one of them is harboring a secret that the whole family is desperate to cover up. Meanwhile, Detective Fry embarks on a personal journey back to her roots. As she finds herself drawn into an investigation of her own, Fry realizes there is only one person she can rely on for the help she needs. But that man is Ben Cooper, and he's back in Derbyshire, where his suspicions lead him toward a shocking discovery on the banks of another Peak District river.

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."

"Features Tate's work from the last two decades, selected from seven books of poetry"--Front flap.

Masterfully drawing on a variety of voices and characters, James Tate joyfully offers his first book since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his Selected Poems. The book covers a vast range of images; a child's shoe in the road, a word on the kitchen counter "next to the pitcher of cream/with its blue cornflowers bent," "a city whose citizens...did not live in any one place/but roamed the boulevards and alleyways/picking up gumwrapppers and setting them down again," a woman leading a bumblebee "as big as a Saint Bernard," a retired eland that "watches television from early morning until late at night." But each image can exist only in the context of its poem, where it becomes something greater, where it underlines - together with other equally brilliant and eccentric images - all that is elusive about human experience.