While the place and year of Steve Malmude’ s birth (Manhattan, 1940) nominally stamp him as a second-generation poet of the New York School, his hieratic, almost ideogrammatic poems, made slowly and carefully – sometimes over many years – are utterly distinct from those of his peers. With substantial selections from his books – all but ten of Malmude’ s previously published poems are included here – Red Carpet also gathers unpublished early work (the opening sonnet was written in 1958, when Malmude’ s guiding star was Robert Lowell) along with poems written after he relocated to Limerick, Maine, in 2002.