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from his books – all but ten of Malmude's previously published poems are included here – Red Carpet also gathers unpublished early work (the opening sonnet was written in 1958, when Malmude's guiding star was Robert Lowell) along with poems written after he relocated to Limerick,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.