Ten Poems Ten Years Later

A Review of Eighteenth in Line to the Throne by James Tate (Press Brake 2025)

Ten years have passed since the death of the poet James Tate, but in that time something remarkable has happened: already there have been two posthumous publications of his work, starting with The Government Lake: Last Poems (Ecco, 2019) followed soon after by the selected Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate (Ecco, 2023). Now a new book, arriving without the major fanfare of the previous two, serves to extend Tate’s legacy by collecting poems that had never before been released.

Published in May of this year by Press Brake, Eighteenth in Line to the Throne quietly entered the literary scene not through one of the major outlets as might be expected of a poet of Tate’s stature but rather through a small local press based in Northampton, Massachusetts, just shy of fifteen miles from where Tate lived in Pelham. Ian Fishman, founding editor of Press Brake, started the press in 2024 as a way to showcase the local poets he had grown up admiring, with one of the most influential ones being Tate.

The ten poems here join to form a work that resurfaces the distinct genius of James Tate for an audience that has only grown larger each year. The index indicates they were all written by Tate between 2006 and 2007, not long before the publication of The Ghost Soldiers, and it quickly becomes evident that they form a kind of narrative pattern. Many of the poems begin familiarly: “I saw a man chasing his dog down the street” plainly sets the scene of the first poem in the collection. Characteristically written in the deadpan description of an ordinary passerby, the passive-at-first pedestrian, each of these poems follows one of Tate’s familiar formulae: either something extraordinary or supernatural disturbs the realm of the ordinary or vice versa, or something or other disturbs the stability of the speaker’s domestic life. Often these happen simultaneously so that, by the end of this first poem, we come upon the following self-revelatory lines: “I’m bleeding badly and / don’t know what to do. I broke the rules and now I’m paying for / it. I’m sorry, please forgive me.” Despite the humor almost omnipresent in Tate’s oeuvre, there is almost always a certain degree of regret, a sinister pathos, even homesickness throughout any one of his books.

In his 2006 interview with Charles Simic published by the Paris Review—around the same time Tate was writing the poems in this collection—Tate dismisses the perceived separation between comedy and tragedy: “They’re in the same theatre, on the same stage. That’s true of the best poems. You can’t tell where they are going to go.” These poems rescue the reader from mistaking them for cliche. In almost every case, these poems surprise themselves. This collection manages to frame these tragi-comic poems as happening within the same community, so that despite the fantasticality of the events that unfold every poem feels situated on some common civic ground. In the last poem in the collection, “Cousin Hank,” two characters reflect on the generational differences that leave them feeling stranded in a sense:

. . . “They’re all going to leave Chesterfield. There’s no jobs here,” he
said. “They all have computers. They can work anywhere,” I said.
“I guess I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’m kind of
out of step with the times,” he said. “The world really does
change. You’d be amazed at what these kids can do,” I said.
“I guess I missed out on all that. I was too busy working,” he
said. . .

Homesickness turns into loneliness. By the end of the poem the two have returned home from a fishing trip. The speaker asks Cousin Hank why he didn’t bring his fish, to which he replies: “I threw him back. Why / complicate things?” The loneliness is not absolved. But there is smugness in the end of this poem, a touch of humor that, while not completely doing away with the seriousness of the lines above, gives the poem a glimmer of redemption so long as the reader is willing to decouple themselves from any one static definition of a “good” ending. The essence of Tate’s work can be felt anew within these pages: a few shots in the dark at the impossible absurdity of being; a lighthearted step into the illogical deep end of the human condition.

James Tate has already firmly established himself as a sui generis genie of American letters: his work endures as it continues to influence contemporary poetry. With this new showcase of unpublished work, readers may rejoice at this small yet significant addition to an archive of over twenty books. These poems join the bizzaro harmony of the rest of his work. They sing and they dance, but they also guffaw and stumble. Or as put another way, as Tate does in “In the Basket:” “I didn’t know what I was doing, but it / seemed so right, so precise, like a language we had / entirely forgotten, coming back, dancing around on our tongues, then / dying again. . .”

NOAH HALE is a writer currently living and teaching in Amherst, Massachusetts.