Introduction:

I was introduced to James Tate through a selection of the ‘best’ American poetry of 2016. The series now is not even worth the paper it is printed on due to their ‘inclusion’ of poems written by professors of English literature, generally understood to be the worst poetry writers, maybe right after postcolonial studies, feminist studies, African studies, and other ‘studies’ in second-rate disciplines. The poems are too ideological and frankly, unreadable. Completely devoid of that touch of the poet, and cheap in all the artistic ways. Unaesthetic by choice. Good thing the 2016th edition was edited by Ed Hirsch, one of the last good English-language poets alive. I read Dome of the Hidden Temple in a Starbucks in Udailiya (a Kuwaiti city). The poem was just fantastic. I read it to my friend who was with me and translated it sentence by sentence. Then I read it to my aunt, some friends, etc. Until it was the time I read it to my friend, Mubarak, whose taste is the only one I hold to an esteem as high as mine. (If Mubarak likes it, it’s good. If he doesn’t, it is sufficiently deficient so as to be disliked.) He was in awe. At that moment, I knew I struck gold. I ordered this volume and sunk myself into it.

The poem that made me get the book is a poem of lasting beauty. A true piece of art, and one that will survive. The book starts with poems that are very high in quality. However, one slowly gets used to the style of the poems. I thought that the whole volume would be inventive. The same themes keep recurring. No poem is as good as the one enclosed below, Done of the Hidden Temple, which has attracted me so much. When I was two-thirds of the way in, I was so used to the style and themes, I was slugging through it. At some point, I left the volume for a month and returned to it. I finally picked it up to finish it. It’s never as good as that one that makes you buy the volume. With that said, I got to dog-ear ten poems, so I cannot say I am completely dissatisfied. I just got hyped up when I shouldn’t have. It’s a disappointment since what I really wanted was someone who would reinvigorate my faith in poetry. I kept searching for a T. S. Eliot in poetry, and the bar was set too high.

Style and Themes:

The major theme of the book is the strange approach towards life, the world, and normal things. This is one of the most pervasive themes in poetry: To rekindle that infatuation with the world and its objects an adult has lost from his childhood years. Every poem does that. People are simply wacky. Things don’t behave as they do. People die, and others just walk by. The dead walk, all the same, the living speak of mundane things, aliens approach asking for milk, cows meow and cats moo. The book is filled with these strange creatures in the normal structure of the world.

Though this might sound fresh, it grows old very quickly. I do not know if this is intentional, and I would not be surprised if it was. Though this might be considered fallacious reasoning, it might have to do with this volume being published posthumously.

The whole volume adopts the conversational style. There is no poem where at least two persons are conversing with each other. (I really do hope this is not the case for his previous volumes, as well.) The conversations are pretty interesting, and some are unique and interesting. But again, everything about the book gets old. Everything overstays its welcome.

Conclusion:

I have hoped for too much and found too little. There are three poems here that I hold in very high esteem, and the other 80 or so poems are good to mediocre at best. The book could have done better. I am not sure that there is hope for poetry. I will continue hoping, and will continue to believe that ‘Dome of the Hidden Temple’ is one of the best poems written in the English language.

Rochester, New York,
May, 2022.