New & Selected Poems
New poems join a selection from nearly 40 years of Hartman’s groundbreaking computer- and jazz-influenced work. Selections from five previous collections join thirty new poems, giving ample evidence of Hartman’s broad range and mastery.
Charles Hartman’s NEW & SELECTED POEMS will finally establish his rightful place as at least one of the best poets of his generation. It takes a large collection to reveal the range, depth, intricacy, and inventive playfulness of his very very fine sensibility. Most of all I love his intelligence–his refusal of sentimentality that finds an angle for the release of unexpected yet rich and complex feelings, and his range of attitudes and situations matched by astonishing metrical inventiveness and resonance. (‘Songlines/ tune / the travels.’) This intelligence makes for a range that beggars most poets–from elegant short dimeter poems to several sustained and complex long poems on topics ranging from becoming familiar with exotic places to establishing attitudes toward the ways new technologies affect possibilities for feeling and for thinking, or for continuing to think that feeling matters.
Charles Altieri
Charles O. Hartman is a musician’s poet. Those of us who spend our time looking for melodies, and for ways to hang them together, recognize that same impulse in his work; his poems sound like the best Tin Pan Alley songs, graceful and concise. His cadences are as unforced as Lester Young’s, and his language as refined. These verses sing.
Steve Swallow
Charles is a precisionist of language, an improviser searching familiar scales for a wrong note, a word or phrase, that can take him past regular habits of meaning or melody to some new kind of right place.
David Antin
Throughout the New & Selected Poems, Hartman exhibits an extraordinary range of poetic resources and intellectual modes. . . . The new poems showcase a deftness of touch and a sureness of pitch that tend to come only after decades, if ever. . . . This collection marks a culminating point in this poet’s career. I hope his readership swells. An ear as fine as his deserves ours.
Geoffrey Babbitt, Drunken Boat
Landscape with Marmots
Quasimodo Unstraps His Hump
The sky today is a blue that makes other things
petition to be compared to it,
trees that reserved judgment through half May
riot out green all over to the cheers of birds,
the sore throat and the foreign war plead valid cases
almost in vain, and the bank balance
on its short chain forgets to threaten
with customary rancor.
Supposing out at the edge of each world
the rim of darkness lies (often invading
the center, the one place
that can produce it): what gives it that lie?
The very woodchuck of last week
works her way through the high halms, now
with a dwarf double at her hungry side, aware
unconscious of the craft of foxes.
We for whom the hardest lesson is that no virtue
inheres in being uncomfortable or unhappy
may suffer on a day like this
the vertigo of a stair missed in the dark.
Easier to offer thanks for the afternoon
once we know we could not deserve it,
as when the hunter with the groundhog in his sights
decides gracefully never to have existed.