The BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY: 1988 1997 (American Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

David Lehman (Narrator), Harold Bloom (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 1998 | Series: American Poetry Series

The editor's choice of his 75 'best of the best' poems chosen from the 750 published in the annual BEST AMERICAN POETRY series, since 1988. Bloom also comments provocatively on the state of poetry today.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Publishers Weekly This yearly compendium is not to be missed. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

About the Author

Harold Bloom was born in the Bronx in 1930. He is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University. In his first book, Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), Bloom made a spirited case for a poet then out of favor with the academic critical establishment. His subsequent books include The Visionary Company (1961), The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Poetry and Repression (1976), and The Western Canon (1994). He has edited numerous volumes, including several hundred critical studies of major authors that appear under the Chelsea House imprint. Ruin the Sacred Truths (1989) presents the lectures Bloom delivered as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. In The Book of J (1990), Bloom speculated that the author of the oldest portions of the Hebrew Bible may have been a woman in the court of King Solomon. He has also written on religion in two other books, The American Religion (1992) and Omens of Millennium; The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection (1996). Bloom, who has held a MacArthur Fellowship, is currently finishing a study of Shakespeare under the title Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (April 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684842793
• ISBN-13: 978-0684842790
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,416,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An All-American roster of the best poems of the decade!, May 4, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Henderson NV) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997 (American Poetry Series) (Paperback)

The process is simple: each year, you have a prominent poet (a practitioner of the art whose ear is ostensibly close to the ground of the craft) select 75 of the best poems from the hundreds published in magazines that year. Then you make this selection available in a single volume which provides a broad portrait of the current state of the art of poetry in America.

For a decade, this is how it's been done, and John Ashberry, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Louise Gluck, A.R. Ammons, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, and James Tate have each had a hand in fashioning The Best American Poetry anthologies that are the result, resulting in excellent collections whose range and quality have made the series ever more popular with each passing year.

Now, the critic Harold Bloom has taken the 10 resulting volumes and selected the 75 best poems out of the bunch, making a literal Best of the Best American Poetry anthology that is, at the very least, provocative.

Bloom's introductory essay, in which he takes no prisoners in his bombastic critique of the state of American poetry, is worth the price of the book alone. Even if you agree with Bloom's conclusions about what's wrong with how poetry is treated nowadays, his skewering of academia (and even of Adrienne Rich, who served as editor for 1996) is guaranteed to set your blood aboil. If, as Shelley wrote, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, then Bloom has set himself up as Chief Justice. And it turns out that this outspoken critic happens to be a hangin' judge!

As if this weren't enough, then there are the poems themselves: they are all bard-inspiringly good. All the big guns are present (with the exception of Ms. Rich), as well as some less-famous artisans, even including Carolyn Creedon, who is "basically a waitress who goes to school" and whose poem, "litany," is full of "sweaty immediacy" and heartbreaking insight. Talk about a democratic selection!

Other standou! t selections include John Ashberry's "Myrtle," a poem I can't seem to stop thinking about; Lucie Brock-Broido's "Inevitably, She Declined," a compressed and vivid evocation of human history; Anthony Hecht's virtuousic "Prospects"; and Molly Peacock's "Have You Ever Faked an Orgasm?," a cycle which manages to be hilarious, moving, and technically-brilliant all at once.

This is a volume that passes the only real test of literary worth: it rewards re-reading. I urge you to begin.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bloom at his idiosyncratic, agonistic, feisty best, April 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997 (American Poetry Series) (Paperback)

In his introduction to THE BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY, Harold Bloom continues his knockdown fight against the modern multi-culturalists whom he had soundly whipped in his most recent work, THE WESTERN CANON.Seeking to uncover for us the true heirs of the Whitman-Dickinson-Stevens-Hart Crane tradition, he gives us vintage Ashbery, Ammons, Bishop, Clampitt, Hecht, and Kinnell, alongside such exciting new masters as George Bradley, J.D. McClatchy, Thylias Moss, and Charles Wright. Bloom reserves his greatest scorn for Adrienne Rich, editor of the 1996 edition of the BEST AMERICAN POETRY and the apotheosis for Bloom of dedication to multicultural mediocrity. Bloom doesn't argue that these poets and their poems constitute the best of all contemporary poetry, but only that they are the best among the first ten editions of this series. I can't imagine anyone arguing with his choices. Here, he is at his selective best and gives us a powerful volume of visionary poems.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good, July 11, 1998

By 

Georges CSIZMADIA ([e-mail]) (Madrid, Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY: 1988 1997 (American Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

The selection of the poems is absolutely interesting.

In terms of value for your money, the ratio of this book is super-high. You won't need to buy other books for a while since you will spend so much time reading and reading this anthology.

Georges