The Ghost Soldiers

Starred review from March 17, 2008
Over the past several books, the prolific Pulitzer Prize winner Tate (Return to the City of White Donkeys)
has been inching toward the invention of a new kind of American poem, a hybrid of prose poetry (though he’s got loose, almost arbitrary line breaks), fable, surrealism and a sort of outsider folk poetry. These chatty, narrative works humorously treat all kinds of subjects, from civil unrest (“ 'There are soldiers everywhere. Its’ hard/ to tell which side they’re on,’ I said. 'They’re against us./ Everyone’s against us. Isn’t that what you believe’ ”) to altruism (“I said I didn’t want any help from anyone, but, then,/ when no one offered to help, I was really hurt”) and wildcats (“I loved his quick, agile movements, never doubting himself,/ as most of us do). A dark undercurrent runs beneath them all, and war and politics—which tend to confuse the poems’ speakers—are frequent subjects. It’s rare that a poet so far into his career—this is Tate’s 15th collection—comes up with something new; quietly, Tate has found a fresh way of telling some of America’s stories.