- ISBN13: 9780743299770
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
David Wagoner writes about regular lives with plain grace and transcendent humanity, and the seventy-five poems he has chosen for the 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry grapple with life, celebrate freedom, and teem with imaginative energy. With engaging notes from the poets, Wagoner’s superb introductory essay, series editor David Lehman’s astute foreword about the current state of poetry and criticism, and cover art from the beloved poet John Ashbery, The Best American Poetry 2009 is a memorable and delightful addition to a series dedicated to showcasing the work of poets at their best.
For more information: The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman
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Poetry’s inexorable drift toward the chatty and mundane–as well as its obsession with politicized art–is as perfectly demonstrated in this anthology as any other today. Of course, these days poetry just makes us yawn, and we pause only infrequently to waste time building up an angry head of steam. What’s the point, after all? Form and elequence, understatement with a nod to anything like a universal audience is just so passé, dahling. Poets (but mostly their editors) have snarked, harangued and insulted themselves out of a popular audience.
But still the anthologies keep coming, because nobody has the $50 to subscribe to obscure little journals anymore. Poets have to publish SOMEWHERE. And since there are so many now, unconstrained by talent or…heck, restraint, they’re dressed up here, ready to be given for the holidays.
A couple of them are even good. I liked Lance Larsen’s “Why Do You Keep Putting Animals In your Poems?”, and if his title smacks of smug self-reference, his language doesn’t. “Badgers rarely invent stories to make them / Sad about their bodies”, he smiles. And he goes on, beautifully: “My happiness / Is like a flock of sparrows that scatters when a bus / Drives by, then restrings itself two blocks away”. Isn’t that lovely?
Denise Duhamel’s “How It Will End” defies the modern trend. Its universal theme and delicious ending strike a Billy Collins delight in absurdity. Collins, too, is here (isn’t he always?) and my son smiled when I read him Collins’ “The Great American Poem”. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe “The Lanyard” is the G.A.P. And that was years ago.
The Contributers’ Comments and Notes are, predictably and tellingly, thicker than the poems. In them, poets hold forth, filling you in on that trip to Venice, or the time the cat caught a mouse and they cried. The stand-alone poem–where you have all the information and life-experience you need to relate to it, and where the language, form and metaphor wrap you in the divine, and where each time in your life you read it, you grow a little more–is a long-gone dream. I fear we will never see its like again.
Rating: 3 / 5
The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman
It’s been three or four years since I last read in this series, so I can’t speak to whether it’s an improvement over its most recent predecessors. This edition lacks long poems or anything particularly moving, arresting, or, for that matter, infuriating. At best there were a few that made me smile (among them Denise Duhamel, Richard Howard, James Richardson (albeit with a very arch, very The New Yorker poem), Matthew Zapruder (the ending)), and a couple that were formally clever (Ronald Wallace, especially). There are also some duds by famous names (e.g., Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver), with W.S. Merwin’s more admirable than lovable and John Ashberry’s entertaining but, by his own admission, sort of lazy. Billy Collins’s contribution did not impress me as much as it did other reviewers. A few poems inspired by the Holocaust, the Iraq War or other awful historical events were among the weakest. And some of the contributors’ notes tell you more than you need to know. The book is more of a palate-cleanser than a main course; you’ll be able to get through most or all of it on a cross-country flight, which seems like an appropriate venue for reading it.
My indifference to most of this anthology may have been biased by the fact that I had been dipping into Montale’s early work (Ossi di seppia/Cuttlefish Bones) a few days before picking up this book. To say that’s a much better way to spend your time (e.g., in Jonathan Galassi’s bilingual version) is a wild understatement, but maybe you’ll find it a helpful steer nonetheless.
Rating: 3 / 5
The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman
This is just more of the same. There are a few spectacular poems, but Wagoner does the same mediocre job that the previous editors have done. When is Lehman gonna get a Dana Gioia, R.S. Gwynn, Kim Addonizio, Dave Mason, or AE Stallings to bring this series up to what it should be?
Rating: 3 / 5
The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman
The one earlier review strikes me as being written by someone who does not understand poetry and so compensates by posting an unfavorable review in which he continulally whines about how poor the poetry is, for the simple reason that many of the poems seem to be over his head. You would do well to ignore him and instead read this anthology.
Rating: 5 / 5
The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman
Excellent eclectic selection of poetry for any mood or situation. A worthwhile addition to a poetry collection.
Rating: 5 / 5
The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman