HAYDEN CARRUTH published more than thirty books during his lifetime, including Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995, which received the National Book Award for Poetry, and Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, which received the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Known also for his criticism, Carruth authored several prose collections, including Selected Essays & Reviews and Sitting In: Selected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Related Topics, as well as nonfiction works, including Beside the Shadblow Tree: A Memoir of James Laughlin and Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays. He taught at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and at the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.


“Hayden Carruth is one of the finest poets now at work in the United States. Brothers, I Loved You All reveals his several powers at their full maturity. These include the powerfully spare and precise lyricism of his songs; his almost spooky sensitivity to the voices of the people in his idylls; the larger grave music of his philosophical meditations; and everywhere, gathering all the other powers, the clear mind, Lucretian in its exact intelligence. The final work in the book, “Paragraphs,” is startling in its mastery, surely one of the few great poems written in English during recent years.”—James Wright