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100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century

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Poet Laureate Mark Strand has selected well-known voices, as well as the more obscure poets, "a carefully chosen sampler juxtaposing long and short form, experimental and traditional style, expected and surprising choices." These are the voices of the 2oth century, an international collection, half from outside of the United States, some translated from other languages, a mix of humor and drama, designed for those who love poetry and those who are just discovering the beauty of this form. A distinction: these are not the hundred great poems of the century, but a hundred poems, surely enough to whet any appetite, a kaleidoscope of images as viewed by individuals, representing North and South America and Europe, the North American poets limited to those born after 1927.

The voice of war rings loud, the memory of loss still fresh and wounding, the world scarred by conflict, the horrors endured:

"Up there in the Aleutians
they are knocking the gold
teeth out of the dead Japanese"

and...

"You know by now there
isn't much to live for
except to spite Hitler-
The war is so lurid
that everything else is dull."
(Ruth Stone, "That Winter")

For those who live day to day in managed care, white-sheathed nurses watching, evening brings quiet, one more passing of a burdened day:

"It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bone needles
of the games of anagram and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask."
(Louise Bogan, "Evening in the Sanitarium")


There are musings of death, choices made and wisdom gleaned in flashes, images that strike like lightning, illuminating:

"I am bound by my own thirty-year-old
decision: who drinks the wine
Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment
New discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down
their bones: I must wear mine."
(Robinson Jeffers, "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones")

Richard Wright's "I Have Seen Black Hands" calls a nation to acknowledge the struggle, the great anguish of bent backs, hard work and irreconcilable loss:

"And the black hands strained and clawed and struggled in vain at
the noose that tightened about the black throat,
And the black hands waved and beat fearfully at the tall flames that
cooked and charred the black flesh...

And some day- and it is only this which sustains me-
Someday there shall be millions and millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!"

Through the passage of the century, memories cling, fragments of the past, forgotten until discovered in the bottom of a drawer, or glimpsed in a photograph:

"No it was not because it was too far
you failed to visit me that day or night.
From year to year it grows in us until it takes hold
I understood it as you did: indifference."
(Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for N.N.")

Here are the words of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, W.H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Michaux, Ranier Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke and Dylan Thomas, to name a few. With biographies and index, this volume reflects a century, events that changed the face of the globe, coexisting with intimate moments and small solitudes, all fragments of the whole, food for the soul, carefully selected, one hundred voices ringing. Luan Gaines/2005.

As Strand states in this introduction, this book presents a 100 great poems of the 20th century, not the 100 great poems of the 20th century. The selection naturally reflects Strand's personal but excellent taste. He has caste a wide net, including poets from several European countries, Latin America, Turkey, and Israel, as well as a generous selection of American poets. Some very famous poems are presented but also some less known but worthy poems by famous poets. Strand has also tried to balance the nature of the poems, including both humourous and serious works, hence the inclusion of a poem by Ogden Nash and a relatively lighthearted poem by the Spanish poet Alberti. Some readers may be disappointed by the exclusion of some of their favorite poems. I, for example, would have chosen different poems by William Carlos Williams, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, but Strand has certainly chosen well. Perhaps because Strand is himself an accomplished poet, I think some poems have been selected on the basis of what might be called technical merit, demonstrations of how to achieve a variety of effects via poetic efforts.
The best part of this anthology, like all good anthologies, is encountering important but unfamiliar works. This anthology features a number of powerful works probably unknown to most of the reading public in this country. Reading Thom Gunn's Lament or the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet's Things I Didn't Know I Loved is worth the price of the book.

almost all of the poems in this collection could have been written in "paragraph", or essay form. it seems that the writers of these poems had some sort of passion about the subjects which they chose to write about, and that is good. but i was constantly annoyed that they decided to write about their thoughts in the form of a poem. It seemed that this genre of writing simply stunted their passions and ideas - as if they were more concerned about construing their thoughts in the poem format, and yet didn't quite know how to do that. the result is a collection of stifled works that do not read particularly well as poems, and yet seem to cry out for the full freedom of exspression that an essay would have allowed. NOT EVERYONE IS A POET - AND THAT IS OKAY. GOT IT ? i believe that a poem is a brilliant arrangement of words about a writers ideas that serve to inspire and immerse the reader in the passion of the thoughts via this - again - "brilliant arrangement of words " , in the style we call the poem. *** another comment i have about this book is the general theme that mark strand seems to have chosen when considering what works to allow in this book -his personal selection of what he considers the " great poems of the twentieth century". the common thread linking most of the poems collected in this volume is in fact the subject of regret that the poets all seem to have about ....who knows what. most of them ramble remorsefully about nothing imparticular - and in, again, a very amateurish "poetry" style . i think that a poem should contain some form of enlightenment, and should be written cleverly enough to get the reader to enjoy the work; feel inspired, somehow. very few poems in this collection meet the criteria . i note that one of the reviewers on this page has copied some lines from a few of the poems in the book that were about something concrete that had actually happened to the poem writers, and had impacted them enough to compell them to write of it. however, again, it is safe to say that practically all of the other ninety-nine works in this book are meandering , dissconnected, and incomplete thoughts that these "poets" have clearly tried in vain to squeeze into the "poem" outfit. someone should tell them that they would learn more - and be able to share more with their readers - if they would simply write out their thoughts as essays. i think that there are few poets in the world, and in my opinion this collection does not contain the works of hardly a one of them. i must say, also, that the reviewer who quotes from some of the poems in this book in her review really had to dig - trust me - to come up with even a few tatters of worthwhile reading from the material offered. oh well, maybe her review got this book some readers .