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American Wake NewSouth Books Thomas Rabbitt’s first book, Exile, won the U.S. Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1975, and through another dozen collections over the years he has continued to win the admiration of readers and other poets. As Fred Chappell observes, “Mr. Rabbitt is the genuine article. Hardly a line in [American Wake] doesn’t ring with wry, sad humor, along with a plentiful dose of self-mockery. Here is a poet who tries hard—always.” American Wake contains fourteen new poems plus poems from six of Rabbitt’s previous books (several smaller books and chapbooks are not represented). The present volume is thus “selected” rather than “collected,” and the poems were chosen by the author on the basis of what caused him the least urge—looking back over three decades of writing—to “slash and burn.” As readers, we can be grateful that he resisted that instinct toward his earlier work, though he has always done both with our prejudices and preconceived notions. A formalist, traditionalist, modernist, post-modernist, outsider, scholar, and critic—Rabbitt is all and none. The only safe assumption one can make about this gifted writer is that his poems, as Rabbitt said, “disturb the universe just by being.”
Reviews “Is Thomas Rabbitt the Yeats of Alabama, the Lowell of Boston’s middle class, the Richard Hugo of Ireland, the John Berryman of Tuscaloosa? Rabbitt’s powerful and distinctive voice assimilates those poets (and many more) into his unique and dazzling songs, stories, meditations, and laments. American Wake is an important book and a body of work that any serious reader of poetry should know.” “Perhaps it has to be the poet’s first article of faith that, [as Rabbitt writes,] ‘Nothing’s pointless under the spinning sun.’ Perhaps this faith is what makes the lines of Thomas Rabbitt’s American Wake so seethingly a-buzz with life, with pungent insight, and with close focused feeling. This selection of his new and old is valuable in many ways, not least in reminding us how substantial is this fine poet’s achievement.” “American Wake, a book freighted with a lifetime of intense living, is as beautifully crafted and polished as an expensive sloop; and as sharply and deftly etched as its complex path of emotional tacks. As with any major aesthetic achievement, it has in tow what has led it forward, a commitment to art that is nothing less than devotional.”
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