Carruth, Hayden 1921-

views updated

Carruth, Hayden 1921-

PERSONAL:

Surname accented on final syllable; born August 3, 1921, in Waterbury, CT; son of Gorton Veeder (an editor) and Margery Tracy Carruth; married Sara Anderson, March 14, 1943; married Eleanore Ray, November 29, 1952; married Rose Marie Dorn, October 28, 1961; married Joe-Anne McLaughlin, December 29, 1989; children: (first marriage) Martha Hamilton; (third marriage) David Barrow. Education: University of North Carolina, A.B., 1943; University of Chicago, M.A., 1948. Politics: Abolitionist.

ADDRESSES:

Home—RD 1, Box 128, Munnsville, NY 13409.

CAREER:

Poet, writer, and editor. Poetry, editor-in-chief, 1949-1950; University of Chicago Press, associate editor, 1951-52; Intercultural Publications, Inc., project administrator, 1952-53. Poet-in-residence, Johnson State College, 1972-74; adjunct professor, University of Vermont, 1975-78; visiting professor, St. Michael's College, Winooskie, VT. Syracuse University, professor of English, 1979-85, 1986-91, professor emeritus, 1991—; Bucknell University, professor, 1985-86. Owner and operator, Crow's Mark Press, Johnson, VT. Military service: U.S. Army Air Forces, World War II; became staff sergeant; spent two years in Italy.

MEMBER:

New York Foundation for the Arts (senior fellow, 1993).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Vachel Lindsay Prize, 1954, Bess Hokin Prize, 1956, Levinson Prize, 1958, and Morton Dauwen Zabel Prize, 1967, all from Poetry magazine; Harriet Monroe Poetry Prize, University of Chicago, 1960, for The Crow and the Heart; grant-in-aid for poetry, Brandeis University, 1960; Bollingen Foundation fellowship in criticism, 1962; Helen Bullis Award, University of Washington, 1962; Carl Sandburg Award, Chicago Daily News, 1963, for The Norfolk Poems; Emily Clark Balch Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review, 1964, for North Winter; Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, 1964; Guggenheim Foundation fellow, 1965 and 1979; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1967; National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities grant, 1967 and 1974; Governor's Medal, State of Vermont, 1974; Shelley Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America, 1978; Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, 1978, for Brothers, I Loved You All; The Voice That Is Great within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century was selected as one of the New York Public Library's Books for the Teen Age, 1981 and 1982; Whiting Writers Award, Whiting Foundation, 1986; Sarah Josepha Hale award, 1988; senior fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1988; Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, 1990; honorary degrees from New England College, 1987, Syracuse University, 1993; National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, 1993; Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, both 1996, both for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1996.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

The Crow and the Heart, 1946-1959, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1959.

In Memoriam: G.V.C., privately printed, 1960.

Journey to a Known Place (long poem), New Directions (New York, NY), 1961.

The Norfolk Poems: 1 June to 1 September 1961, Prairie Press (Iowa City, IA), 1962.

North Winter, Prairie Press (Iowa City, IA), 1964.

Nothing for Tigers; Poems, 1959-1964, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1965.

Contra Mortem (long poem), Crow's Mark Press (Johnson, VT), 1967.

(Contributor) Where Is Vietnam? American Poets Respond, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1967.

For You: Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1970.

The Clay Hill Anthology, Prairie Press (Iowa City, IA), 1970.

From Snow and Rock, from Chaos: Poems, 1965-1972, New Directions (New York, NY), 1973.

Dark World, Kayak (Santa Cruz, CA), 1974.

The Bloomingdale Papers, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1975.

Loneliness: An Outburst of Hexasyllables, Janus Press (Rogue River, OR), 1976.

Aura, Janus Press (Rogue River, OR), 1977.

Brothers, I Loved You All, Sheep Meadow (New York, NY), 1978.

Almanach du Printemps Vivarois, Nadj, 1979.

The Mythology of Dark and Light, Tamarack (Madison, WI), 1982.

The Sleeping Beauty, Harper (New York, NY), 1983, revised edition, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1990.

If You Call This Cry a Song, Countryman Press (Woodstock, VT), 1983.

Asphalt Georgics, New Directions (New York, NY), 1985.

Lighter than Air Craft, edited by John Wheatcroft, Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA), 1985.

The Oldest Killed Lake in North America, Salt-Works Press (MA), 1985.

Mother, Tamarack Press, 1985.

The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1986.

Sonnets, Press of Appletree Alley (Lewisburg, PA), 1989.

Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies across the Nacreous River at Twilight toward the Distant Islands, New Directions (New York, NY), 1989.

Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1992.

Collected Longer Poems, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1993.

Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1996.

Doctor Jazz: Poems, 1996-2000, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2001.

Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems, edited by Sam Hammill, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2006.

EDITOR

(With James Laughlin) A New Directions Reader, New Directions (New York, NY), 1964.

The Voice That Is Great within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, Bantam (New York, NY), 1970.

The Bird/Poem Book: Poems on the Wild Birds of North America, McCall, 1970.

The Collected Poems of James Laughlin, Moyer Bell (Wakefield, RI), 1994.

(And author of introduction) James Laughlin, A Commonplace Book of Pentastichs, New Directions (New York, NY), 1998.

OTHER

Appendix A (novel), Macmillan (New York, NY), 1963.

After "The Stranger": Imaginary Dialogues with Camus, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1964.

(Contributor) The Art of Literary Publishing, Pushcart Press (Wainscott, NY), 1980.

Working Papers: Selected Essays and Reviews, edited by Judith Weissman, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1981.

Effluences from the Sacred Caves: More Selected Essays and Reviews, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1984.

Sitting In: Selected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Related Topics (includes poetry), University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1986, expanded edition, 1993.

Suicides and Jazzers, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1992.

Selected Essays and Reviews, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1995.

Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1998.

Beside the Shadblow Tree: A Memoir of James Laughlin, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1999.

Listener's Guide: Reading from Collected Shorter Poems and Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (sound recording), Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1999.

Letters to Jane, Ausable Press (Keene, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Poetry, Hudson Review, New Yorker, and Partisan Review. Member of editorial board, Hudson Review, 1971—; poetry editor, Harper's, 1977-83.

SIDELIGHTS:

"Now and then a poet comes along whose work ranges across wide and diverse territories of form, attitude, and emotion—yet with the necessary intelligence that belies a deep, lifelong engagement with tradition—so that variance never seems mere experimentation or digression, but improvisation," wrote Midwest Quarterly contributor Matthew Miller. "Hayden Carruth is such an artist."

The Pulitzer Prize won by Carruth in 1996 for his collection Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995, provided a grace note for a long academic and literary career that has seen the author become known as an proponent of twentieth-century modernism. Though recognized primarily as a critic and editor, Carruth is also an acclaimed poet whose poetry elicits praise from those who admire its wide variety of verse forms and criticism from those who find its precision and restraint too impersonal and academic.

Commenting in his book Babel to Byzantium, James Dickey speculated that these opposing views of Carruth's work may result from the occasionally uneven quality of his poetry. In a discussion of The Crow and the Heart, for example, Dickey noted "a carefulness which bursts, once or twice or three times, into a kind of frenzied eloquence, a near-hysteria, and in these frightening places sloughing off a set of mannerisms which in the rest of the book seems determined to reduce Carruth to the level of a thousand other poets." Dickey went on to write that Carruth "is one of the poets (perhaps all poets are some of these poets) who write their best, pushing past limit after limit, only in the grip of recalling some overpowering experience. When he does not have such a subject at hand, Carruth amuses himself by being playfully skillful with internal rhyme, inventing bizarre Sitwellian images, being witty and professionally sharp."

An American Poetry Review contributor characterized Carruth as "a poet who has always chosen to make his stand just aside from any of the presently conflicting mainstreams," noting that such linguistic playfulness is typical of the poet's early work. The contributor attributed it to Carruth's struggle "to restore equilibrium to the soul [and] clarity to vision, through a passionate command of language," a struggle that gives much of his poetry "a Lear-like words-against-the-storm quality." The contributor continued: "I won't be the first to say Carruth's early work is cumbered by archaisms, forced inversions, sometimes futile extravagances of vocabulary and a tendency of images and metaphors to reify into a top heavy symbolism." The contributor added: "But the courage of [his] poems can't be faulted. From the earliest and against great odds, Carruth made many attempts at many kinds of poems, many forms, contending qualities of diction and texture." The contributor also noted: "If the struggle of contending voices and attitudes often ends in poems that don't quite succeed, it remains that the struggle itself is moving for its truthfulness and intensity." The reviewer went on to write: "Carruth uniformly refuses to glorify his crazies. They are pain and pain alone. What glory there is—and there are sparks of it everywhere through these early poems—he keeps for the regenerative stirrings against the storm of pain and isolation."

In his essay, Miller looked at one major influence on Carruth's poetry. "Carruth's relationship to jazz music has been lifelong," he noted, "and it has expressed itself on many different levels in his work." To Miller, Carruth's early grounding in traditional poetic forms prepared him to "improvise" later on, much like the way jazz musicians often study classical music early in their training.

In Carruth's poetry, that means using an external, fixed poetic structure upon which to launch improvisation. But even when he works in a spontaneous, "jazz" mode, his "poetic improvisation does not mean the abandonment of form or rhyme," declared Miller, "nor does it limit itself to any particular attitude or emotion." Miller went on to write: "What improvisation ultimately amounts to is structure becoming a function of feeling, whatever that feeling may be." Miller pointed to Brothers, I Loved You All as a prime example of Carruth in his spontaneous prime.

Like many poets, Carruth also turns to personal experience for inspiration; however, with the possible exception of The Bloomingdale Papers (a long poetic sequence Carruth wrote in the 1950s while confined to a mental hospital for treatment of alcoholism and a nervous breakdown), he does not indulge in the self-obsessed meditations common among some of his peers. Instead, Carruth turns outward, exploring such "universal opposites" as madness (or so-called madness) and sanity or chaos and order. He then tries to balance the negative images—war, loneliness, the destruction of the environment, sadness—with mostly nature-related positive images and activities that communicate a sense of stability—the cycle of the seasons, performing manual labor, contemplating the night sky, observing the serenity of plant and animal life. But, as an American Poetry Review contributor pointed out: "Carruth is not in the least tempted to sentimentality about country life." The contributor added that he "[recognizes] that it can be a life of value and nobility in the midst of difficult facts and chaos." Nor is he "abstractly philosophical or cold." The American Poetry Review contributor also stated: "On the contrary, [his poems] are all poems about very daily affairs: things seen and heard, the loneliness of missing friends absent or dead, the alternations of love for and estrangement from those present, the experiences of a man frequently alone with the non-human which all too often bears the damaging marks of careless human intrusion." Furthermore, the contributor noted, "Carruth comes to the politics of all this with a vengeance," adding: "His [poems] all bear strong public witness against the wastes and shames of our culture that are destroying human value with a will in a world where values are already hard enough to maintain, in a universe where they are always difficult to discover. Carruth does not express much anger in [his] poems. Yet one feels that an enormous energy of rage has forced them to be."

A Saturday Review contributor commented: "[Carruth's] poems have a sureness to them, a flair and variety." The contributor went on to write: "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." The contributor added: "His work teems with the struggle to live and to make sense, and his poems carve out a kind of grace for us."

In the 1990s, the appearance of anthologies and collections of Carruth's verse and prose allowed critics to assess his career as a whole. In reviewing Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, which appeared in 1992, Poetry contributor David Barber called attention to the rich diversity of the poet's oeuvre: "Hayden Carruth is vast; he contains multitudes. Of the august order of American poets born in the Twenties, he is undoubtedly the most difficult to reconcile to the convenient branches of classification and affiliation, odd man out in any tidy scheme of influence and descent." Somewhat deceptively titled, Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, which won the 1992 National Book Critics' Circle Award, is not a comprehensive volume but is comprised of selections from thirteen of Carruth's previously published volumes, together with many poems appearing for the first time. Writing in the Nation, Ted Solotaroff found the volume to be a welcome opportunity for giving a "full hearing" to "a poet as exacting and undervalued as Carruth generally has been." Solotaroff highlighted two characteristics typifying Carruth's poetic achievement. First, he describes him as a "poet's poet, a virtuoso of form from the sonnet to free verse, from medieval metrics to jazz ones." Second, Solotaroff drew attention to the moral seriousness of Carruth's work as a critic of contemporary poetry, claiming that the poet "has also been, to my mind, the most catholic, reliable and socially relevant critic of poetry we have had in an age of burgeoning tendencies, collapsing standards and a general withdrawal of poets from the public to the private sector of consciousness."

The 1993 volume, Collected Longer Poems, received similar praise from many critics, who felt that this collection contained much of the poet's best work. A contributor to the American Book Review characterized Carruth's poetry as being "grounded in the traditions of Romance, in entre-les-guerres modernism revised in light of mid-century existentialism, and in his own personal forms of nonviolent anarchism." A contributor to the Bloomsbury Review called attention to the importance of the volume's opening selection, "The Asylum," which details the poet's experiences of being hospitalized for a breakdown. The reviewer judged these "among the most honest and harrowing in the volume," maintaining that "they ring with the compelling voice of despair; the wind floats through them, and the reader finds himself staring at the November landscape, leafless, dark, and dormant."

Carruth's prose discussions of poets and poetry were anthologized in the 1995 volume Selected Essays and Reviews. Spanning thirty years of his critical writing, this collection was enthusiastically received by critics, who singled out for particular praise the essays on Alexander Pope, Edwin Muir, and Paul Goodman. In the following year, Carruth's Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995 was published, a volume that centers on meditations of such themes as politics, history, aging, nostalgia, guilt, and love. The book would garner not just the Pulitzer Prize but also the National Book Award in 1996. Another collection, Doctor Jazz: Poems, 1996-2000, was written as Carruth approached his ninth decade and includes a fifteen-page elegy to the author's daughter, Martha, who died in her forties of cancer. That poem in particular "refuses to release us until its final syllable," wrote Library Journal reviewer Fred Muratori.

In 1998 Carruth turned to a different form of self-narrative with Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays. These essays—the words of a self-described "old man in his cave of darkness, regretting his arthritis and impotence and failing imagination"—speak frankly of his often troubled life, including treatment for depression, debilitating phobias, and a nearly successful suicide attempt. Peter Szatmary, writing in Biblio, found the "fractured" nature of Carruth's life reflected in his prose: "At its best, [Reluctantly] isolates idiosyncratic clarity. At its worst it betrays arbitrary self-indulgence." In a similar vein, "fragmentary" was the word used by Ray Olson, contributor to Booklist to describe the memoir, though Olson also characterized the book as a "powerful autobiography." A Publishers Weekly contributor had a similar impression, noting that Reluctantly shows that "although life is messy and unpredictable, it is possible to survive, to write well and to salvage from the wreckage a redemptive dignity."

In 2004, Carruth's letters to poet Jane Kenyon before she died were published as Letters to Jane. In his letters to Kenyon, who was ill at the time, the author writes about pain and suffering, hospitals and confinement, and the looming of death. However, he also discusses lighter topics, such as his pets and animals, the art of writing, and even the weather. His dedication to writing to Kenyon led him to correspond with her even while he was on the road at public readings or traveling to various functions. "Surely these newsy, unpretentious, intelligent missives lifted Kenyon's spirits; certainly they do ours," wrote Ray Olson in Booklist.

Another collection of Carruth's poems was published in 2006. Titled Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems, the volume includes a wide selection of poems chosen by editor Sam Hamill and covers poems from the poet's early days on to his recent new poems. Although Hamill decided to leave out the author's longer poems, found in Collected Longer Poems, he nevertheless chooses from numerous other collections of the author's shorter works, including FromSnow and Rock, from Chaos: Poems, 1965-1972, Brothers, I Loved You All, Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies across the Nacreous River at Twilight toward the Distant Islands, and Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey. The poems range from Carruth's haiku poem "The Loon on Forester's Pond" and the blank-verse "John Dryden" to his antiwar poems and his elegiac verse to his dead daughter. In the newer poems, the author primarily comments on modern world events, such as the Iraq war.

In a review of Toward the Distant Islands in Publishers Weekly, a contributor wrote: "All sides of Carruth's oeuvre find a place in this … dexterously compiled" volume. Brian Henry commented in the New York Times Book Review that he does not consider Carruth's newer poems quite as good as his older work. Nevertheless, Henry wrote that "the new ones embody many of the strengths—mastery of various styles and voices, political commitment, and devotion to others—that have produced an extraordinary record of an extraordinary life in the second half of the 20th century." In his review of the collection in Booklist, Ray Olson noted that the author's "present crusty-but-lusty-old-geezer persona is far from unrewarding."

A contributor to a 2005 University of Chicago magazine profile of the author visited the author at his home and commented on his life and work. In the article, the contributor noted: "For Carruth struggle has been the stuff of life and poetry." In the same article, Carruth stated: "If you've got any courage and any sense of responsibility, you'll do what you have to do. I don't give myself any extraordinary credit for that. But the difficulties were there and the difficulties made my poetry better. I'm convinced of that."

Carruth once told CA: "I have a close but at the same time uncomfortable relationship with the natural world. I've always been most at home in the country probably because I was raised in the country as a boy, and I know something about farming and woodcutting and all the other things that country people know about. That kind of work has been important to me in my personal life and in my writing too. I believe in the values of manual labor and labor that is connected with the earth in some way. But I'm not simply a nature poet. In fact, I consider myself and I consider the whole human race fundamentally alien. By evolving into a state of self-consciousness, we have separated ourselves from the other animals and the plants and from the very earth itself, from the whole universe. So there's a kind of fear and terror involved in living close to nature. My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.

"I think there are many reasons for poets and artists in general to be depressed these days. They have to do with a lot … [of] things that are going on in our civilization. They have to do with the whole evolution of the sociology of literature during the last fifty years. Things have changed; they've turned completely around. I don't know if I can say it briefly but I'll try. When I was young and starting to write poetry seriously and to investigate the resources of modern poetry, as we called it then, we still felt beleaguered; modern poetry was still considered outrageous by most of the people in the publishing business and in the reading audience at large. We still spoke in terms of the true artists and the philistines. We felt that if we could get enough people to read T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams and other great poets of that period, then something good would happen in American civilization. We felt a genuine vocation, a calling, to try and make this happen. And we succeeded. Today thousands of people are going to colleges and attending workshops and taking courses in twentieth-century literature. Eliot and Stevens are very well known, very well read; and American civilization has sunk steadily, progressively, further and further down until most of the sensible people are in a state of despair. It's pretty obvious that good writing doesn't really have very much impact on social events or national events of any kind. We hope that it has individual impact, that readers here and there are made better in some way by reading our work. But it's a hope; we have no proof."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Carruth, Hayden, Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1998.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 18, 1981, Volume 84, 1994.

Dickey, James, Babel to Byzantium, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1968.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, September, 1995, review of Collected Longer Poems, p. 23.

American Poetry Review, May, 1979, review of Brothers, I Loved You All, p. 13; January, 1981, Alastair Reid, review of Brothers, I Loved You All, p. 19.

Antioch Review, fall, 2002, John Taylor, review of Doctor Jazz: Poems, 1996-2000, p. 714.

Biblio, April, 1999, Peter Szatmary, review of Reluctantly, p. 60.

Booklist, August, 1998, Ray Olson, review of Reluctantly, p. 1953; April 15, 1999, review of Beside the Shadblow Tree: A Memoir of James Laughlin, p. 1502; September 1, 2001, Ray Olson, review of Doctor Jazz, p. 44; September 1, 2004, Ray Olson, review of Letters to Jane, p. 33; March 1, 2006, Ray Olson, review of Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems, p. 55.

Georgia Review, spring, 2000, Jeff Gundy, review of Reluctantly, p. 142; summer, 2004, Brian Henry, "Freedom and Discipline: Hayden Carruth's Blues" p. 261.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 1998, review of Reluctantly, p. 788.

Library Journal, September 1, 1990, Ben Howard, review of Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies across the Nacreous River at Twilight toward the Distant Islands, p. 263; November 1, 1993, David Barber, review of Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, p. 95; March 1, 1996, Ben Howard, review of Collected Longer Poems, p. 4; July, 1998, David Kirby, review of Reluctantly, p. 88; June 15, 1999, review of Beside the Shadblow Tree, p. 79; September 1, 2001, Fred Muratori, review of Doctor Jazz, p. 184; April 15, 2006, Fred Muratori, review of Toward the Distant Islands, p. 79.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 3, 1984, Clayton Eshelman, review of If You Call This Cry a Song, p. 16.

Midwest Quarterly, spring, 1998, Matthew Miller, "A Love Supreme: Jazz and Poetry of Hayden Carruth," p. 294.

Nation, February 15, 1965, review of Nothing for Tigers; Poems, 1959-1964, p. 180; October 25, 1971, review of For You: Poems, p. 408; November 16, 1992, Ted Solotaroff, review of Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, p. 600; December 27, 1993, review of Suicides and Jazzers, p. 810.

New York Times, January 3, 1976, review of Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, p. 37; October 21, 2001, Ken Tucker, review of Doctor Jazz.

New York Times Book Review, April 6, 1975, review of The Bloomingdale Papers, p. 2; September 2, 1979, Charles Molesworth, review of Brothers, I Loved You All, p. 8; May 23, 1982, D.J.R. Bruckner, review of Working Papers: Selected Essays and Reviews, p. 15; August 21, 1983, review of Working Papers, p. 12; January 22, 1984, Thom Tammaro, review of If You Call This Cry a Song, p. 12; July 14, 1985, R.W. Flint, review of Asphalt Georgics, p.15; May 11, 1986, review of The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, p. 17; December 27, 1992, review of Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, p. 2; September 10, 2006, Brian Henry, "This Grubbing Art," review of Toward the Distant Islands, p. 32.

Poetry, May, 1974, review of The Sleeping Beauty, p. 103; July, 1993, review of Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, p. 237; March, 1996, review of Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995, p. 343; March, 2003, Bruce F. Murphy, review of Doctor Jazz, p. 349; March, 2007, D.H. Tracy, review of Toward the Distant Islands, p. 491.

Publishers Weekly, January 31, 1994, Lawrence Joseph, review of Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, p. 82; October 9, 1995, review of Collected Longer Poems, p. 80; February 26, 1996, review of Collected Longer Poems, p. 101; June 29, 1998, review of Reluctantly, p. 44; April 19, 1999, review of Beside the Shadblow Tree, p. 55; August 6, 2001, review of Doctor Jazz, p. 87; March 13, 2006, review of Toward the Distant Islands, p. 41.

Quadrant, November, 2005, John Greening, "Hayden Carruth and the Desire for More Cows," p. 70.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1999, Amy Havel, review of Beside the Shadblow Tree, p. 167.

Saturday Review, October 27, 1979, Charles Molesworth, review of Brothers, I Loved You All, p. 38.

Threepenny Review, spring, 1999, review of Reluctantly, p. 8.

Times Literary Supplement, July 23, 1971, review of For You, p. 855; August 2, 2002, Ian Tromp, "Blown away by Beauty," review of Doctor Jazz and The Collected Shorter Poems, p. 23.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1971, review of The Clay Hill Anthology, p. 1716; summer, 1979, review of Brothers, I Loved You All, p. 107.

Washington Post Book World, April 13, 1986, Daniel L. Guillory, review of The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, p. 183.

Western American Literature, fall, 1998, review of Selected Essays and Reviews, p. 304.

World Literature Today, summer-autumn, 2002, Michael Leddy, review of Doctor Jazz, p. 95.