Hayden Carruth (1921–2008), is known for powerful work that explores the struggles, loves and desires of people who make their living with their hands. Carruth spent the early part of his life as an editor, critic and poet, but it was during the last twenty years of his life, as a farmer in Vermont, that rooted his voice in what he describes as “freedom writing poetry about things I really knew something about. . . about simple things in simple language.” As a farmer himself, working hardscrabble land in a community of farmers working hardscrabble land, he joined souls with the people about whom he wrote. Poem upon poem, including North River, Regarding Chainsaws, Cows at Night, Marshall Washer and The Ravine, places us, viscerally, beside and inside the subject.

For me, to read Hayden Carruth’s poetry is an un-framed, visceral experience.

In Emergency Haying (2006), Carruth turns reflections on a long day’s labor into a meditation on injustice. It was inspired in response to an 2006 agricultural emergency in Vermont caused by the conflagration of high fuel prices, plunging milk prices and terrible weather for crops. The poem is an ode to both conscripted labor and to the dying farms of farmers all around him.

Over his lifetime, Carruth published literary criticism, essays, a novel, and more than thirty books of poetry. His many awards include a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. --Libby Larsen, 2023