began "to give way to sorrow (watching myself / sorrowlessly the while)." Such saying might seem maudlin were it not, in context, so clearly beyond self-pity; Carruth watches himself with such objective exactitude that the anabasis of his spirit invites any number of writers to remember their own long march….

Few poets have said with such condensed precision … the "inside truth" of their searching-out the interior; Hayden Carruth's triadic pairings, moreover, directly point to the territory in which the poems of this deeply demanding book explore their meanings….

Perhaps one of Stevens' Adagia can most directly illuminate the art of Hayden Carruth's present poems. "In the presence of extraordinary actuality," Stevens says, "consciousness takes the place of imagination."

The actuality of northcountry farmsteading, of animal death, March misery and seasonal love, is ordinary enough in itself. But nothing is entirely "in itself" when met by the poet. In the poet's consciousness of his relationship to the actual, what's ordinary becomes extraordinary as it is raised by the power of an eye immediately focused on the present, as it is raised by the power of a voice (however quiet) which verifies the music of time's constant inconstancy….

Death may be the famous mother of beauty, but beauty is what is vital. Beautiful emotions recollected in tranquility may have served an earlier century, but this century asks no less than tranquility re-collected with emotion. We want our beauty, no matter what its form, made immediate. Thus, partially, our pleasure in Williams' wheelbarrow. Thus, in a different tense, our pleasure in Carruth's loon. Here Carruth implicitly demonstrates what Stevens explicitly propounded: that there are moments of inherent excellence (not only in the ordinary, but perhaps particularly in the ordinary) which, when they are met by the poet's equally open motive, become entirely extraordinary. In what, through his response to the loon's song, becomes the "extraordinary actuality" of their interrelationship, Carruth can consciously but selflessly celebrate the vital nature of both loon and man. In answering the loon as directly as he does, he notably evades all sorts of epistemological problems; he also risks prose statement to the extent he avoids the very language of relationship: metaphor. But his poem has the vital immediacy of a poem precisely because his sense of its temporal nature permeates his saying…. The intensive sequence of the poem comes to consequence both as meaning and as music. Instead of having to imagine meaning, and to manufacture music, Carruth is so ordinarily conscious of both that his participatory awareness makes for extraordinary actuality: the-poem-of-the-words as direct instance of the-poem-of-the-event.

Given Carruth's loon-song, or any number of comparably speculative poems in this book, it's tempting to think that a country poet has, by self-definition, special access to a totality in which every element is naturally symbolic. The danger of such temptation is such facile pantheism as tempted an earlier time; the virtue of such access is the poet's daily consciousness of the symbolic valence inherent in every aspect of nature…. (p. 13)

For a poet like Carruth, the country, especially the harshness of the northcountry, is often a "found" poem; what he finds is mostly as direct as what, at a different latitude, Eudora Welty deeply knows and directly speaks: "It's all right for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they mean." Whether in Mississippi or Vermont (as Carruth's poems prove) things and words are both what they appear to be and more. Not other, more. To be open to the angle of any day's light is to partake (directly as well as symbolically) in the procession of the equinoxes….

His sense of contrast, especially between past and present, is acutely painful; but such contrast constantly gives him a sense of what's far in terms of what's near, a sense of whatever the all amounts to in terms of present particulars….

Carruth yearns openly; his speculations are not small. To the degree they are large, he knows full well their emptiness. (p. 14)

About here I gulp and cannot quite swallow, as if before me in unshakable Vermont there opened up a large geological fault…. [There are over] four hundred blank verse lines about "Vermont"—a perfect echo of Frost's "New Hampshire." The poem in itself is a tour de force, almost Frost's equal in anecdote and nearly his equal in wit; its debt to Frost is so large that part of the poem talks directly of Frost…. But I find little in a book by Hayden Carruth called Poems, 1969–1977, and practically nothing in a book called Brothers, I Loved You All, that provides context for his imitation-Frost-poem called "Vermont."

What "Vermont" does provide is its own apologia and introduction to the four Frostian poems that follow it…. These poems are so good of their kind that, truly, they almost out-Frost Frost. They are Frostian in diction, Frostian in tone, Frostian to the very iamb. (pp. 14-15)

What to say? Only one thing, as quickly as possible: Hayden Carruth is too fine a poet to be imitating another poet's voice. He has, in fact, multiple voices that are sustainingly his own. And these voices return, like crows to Carruth's landmark tree, when he variously speaks as "The Poet," as woodcutter in his Platonic "Essay on Love," as victim of abandonment in "Alba," as father-to-absence in "Missing Bo in the Henhouse." All of these are clearly Hayden Carruth. Again, gratefully, I find myself reading the book that Poems, 1969–1977 began to be and is still becoming.

After "Missing Bo …," the eight lucid triads of "Aura" promise the "new presence" of this book's climactic poem, a poem of some twenty-eight fifteen line strophes, a poem which includes at least a dozen voices that extend and define Carruth's own. As he assimilates those voices (often "found" voices) into his own central consciousness, this long poem called "Paragraphs" presents both the world parade he is part of and his own underscoring of the human and inhuman divisions of that parade. Nothing less than the musically written image, defending against the anguish of both personal and historical events, is the structural basis for this all-out poem. Where "Paterson" insists there be no ideas but in things, "Paragraphs" implicitly makes clear that for Carruth there is no value save in the relation of human events. Drawn though these events are from such various realms as Isaiah, My Lai, Walden, his own bottomland, Purgatorio, Vermont legend, the Civil Rights movement, the Paris Commune, and the 1944 recording session of "Bottom Blues," Carruth takes all of them unto himself. In suffering all, he comes through (like the recording jazzmen) to his own music, a "music high / in the celebration of fear, strange joy / of pain."…

Section 11 of "Paragraphs" is entirely given over … to a celebratory catalogue of Carruth's jazz heroes: musicians like Benny Carter, Cozy Cole, Cootie Williams, Zutty Singleton, Red Norvo, J. C. Higginbotham, Art Tatum, and Chu Berry—an upbeat list of what might be the old "Downbeat" all-stars. Ending this section of "Paragraphs," Carruth speaks directly: "Brothers," he says, "I loved you all." Since that high assertion is the primary title of Carruth's whole book, I take it to have large importance. But since the book is so subtitled as to suggest that Hayden Carruth is looking backwards from the perspective of 1977, I find myself made grimly uneasy by the past tense of "love." Is Carruth suggesting that all he once loved is dead, or that his own love has entirely ceased? If such possibilities apply to the whole book as they apply to Section 11 of "Paragraphs," does Carruth intend "Paragraphs" to be his final mourning for all that time makes irretrievable?

Having been earlier confused by what I thought to be the midway "fault" in the book, the structural fault Frost seems to have been resurrected to fill in, I find myself now wondering if those Frost-poems don't somehow substitute for some event between 1969 and 1977 which Hayden Carruth does not yet want to publish or has not yet written. Only because I know almost nothing of Hayden Carruth's life do I presume such supposition; only because I am so largely moved by Brothers, I Loved You All am I struck by how deeply the past tense of the verb corroborates what feels to me like a gap in the middle of the book. But Carruth is not so simple a poet as he might have a reader believe; just as the individually simple statements of individual poems are paced, held, timed, and released to become a complex music, so it seems likely that the whole book is similarly simple and complex. (p. 15)

[But there is] the truly substantial turn in the book: the turn from the wisdom of "Once and Again" through the parting of "Alba" to the meaning of "paragraphics," as that meaning underlies the whole poem called "Paragraphs."

Paragraphia, as any big dictionary knows, is a mental disorder of which the primary symptom is writing words or letters other than those intended. A dis-order, yes; a dis-order that every writer knows. And rather than ward off such irrational consciousness (as a para-chute wards off falling yet by definition includes high danger), Hayden Carruth has come in the course of this book to admit "paragraphics" ("that lovely word," he says, "chosen with care") to the constantly evolving body of his work. No wonder "Paragraphs" derives from such multiple sources; no wonder so many of its sections include "found" poems; no wonder, finally, that it takes jazz improvisation as its model for both human relationship and the shape of its own art. The movement of this book is from one kind of knowledge to another, from a knowledge that can never be wholly stated to a knowledge that can only be heard, listened to, and lived. Like the ultimate jazz they search for and come to, these poems are the music of a new and changing time, of continual counterpoint, of reaching through relationships for the only possible transcendence. As they move from middle-age to a new regeneration, these poems move to an exact and exacting beat: they prove on the pulse … that writing as extraordinary as Hayden Carruth's is, in truth, the social act of a generously solitary man. (p. 16)

Philip Booth, "Philip Booth: On 'Brothers, I Loved You All'," in The American Poetry Review (copyright © 1979 by World Poetry, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Philip Booth), Vol. 8, No. 3, May-June, 1979, pp. 13-16.

Hayden Carruth has a way of knowing how to write from a collective consciousness. That in itself is greatness. If you have never read any of his many books of poetry, [Brothers, I Loved You All] is the book to read not only for its dramatic tones but also for the pure craft. His concerns, sometimes sentimental, are genuine in his grasp of reality, as we know it, and he has great diction to speak for us. For those who have pondered the placement of "stone" in so many contemporary poems, he has a poem called "Essay on Stone." It should satisfy both the authors with stones and their probing readers. It is also Hayden Carruth's gift to make even that which is peculiar to him known and accessible to us.

"Notes on Current Books: 'Brothers, I Loved You All'," in Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1979, by the Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of Virginia), Vol. 55, No. 3 (Summer, 1979), p. 107.

Somewhere between Robert Frost's pastoral skepticism and Mikhail Bakunin's trust in historical progress, Hayden Carruth makes his way [in "Brothers, I Loved You All"]. He is, finally, a moralist, as this volume's long center piece, "Vermont," shows. He doesn't trust the difference between the contemporary and archaic….

For Mr. Carruth there is "more warmth and far less vanity" in his neighbor's greeting than there is in "people living for the minutest public dissection / of emotion and belief." Running against the tide of fashion and standing on the "absolute stone," the "abyss inverted, the abyss made visible," means that the poet must claim much for his language. That claim rests in part on the Vermont dialect, which he'd rather discuss than glibly mimic. But he also claims that Vermont Republicans and anarchists are the same: "names / are slippery, unreliable things." (p. 8)

His poetry will strike some as insufficiently dialectical, but Mr. Carruth often seems clear about what he's willing to settle for…. "Paragraphs," a long, 28-section poem, is not, as the jacket claims, "surely one of the few great poems written in English during recent years." Nor, I think, would Mr. Carruth, a keen-eyed critic and reviewer, claim so himself. But it is part of a book written out of true feelings and clear vision, and that's enough to make it valuable. (p. 14)

Charles Molesworth, "Fire Poets," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1979 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), September 2, 1979, pp. 8, 14.∗

[Brothers, I Loved You All: Poems 1969–1977 clamors] for attention, in its richness and variety, in its burly energy, in its courage and gusto. His poems have a sureness to them, a flair and variety; they are the work of an old craftsman. Yet, in their dedication to finding an equilibrium in an alien and often cruel landscape, Vermont, where the poet has dug himself in, they reflect the moods and struggles of a man never at rest. His defeats have generated his epiphanies, and he passes on to us a certain gruff blessing, a passion to survive and make sense. His long poem, "Paragraphs," is a major work, a kind of testament of his time. He pervades his own poems. In his beautiful "Essay on Stone," he both becomes stone and makes it almost a human quality. His work teems with the struggle to live and to make sense, and his poems carve out a kind of grace for us. It is, however, his utter dedication to the office of poet that most impresses, that takes poetry beyond the need of any justification. This book fixes him firmly among the most important poets we have.

Alastair Reid, "The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize," in Saturday Review (copyright © 1979 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission). Vol. 6. No. 21, October 27, 1979, p. 38.∗