Riven Doggeries is James Tate's most accessible book since his first, The Lost Pilot, but not necessarily his best. Absences still moves me more than anything else he's written. In it he retains elements of despair, anger, rage: it is surrealism with a razor-edge and transcends the boundaries of any ism. By comparison Riven Doggeries is surrealism with a dacquiri….

Tate's way to the sublime is through the ridiculous because, for him, the sublime is ridiculous. His struggle has been to make language counteract the banality of everyday life and the threat of "oblivion." Tate's aesthetic position is such that even if we could make sense out of our experience we couldn't express it in words since expressive language and poetic diction consist of two components, both negative—cliches and hyperboles—and he uses them so unusually that he highlights their absurdity. (p. 42)

Inventing new metaphors is Tate's...