The Best American Poetry 2001 [Hardcover]

Robert Hass (Author), David Lehman (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 21, 2001 | Series: Best American Poetry

The annual publication of "The Best American Poetry" is an eagerly awaited event among poetry fans across the country. This year's volume in the critically acclaimed series presents American poetry in all its dazzling variety at a moment of extraordinary richness and originality.

Guest editor Robert Hass, a former Poet Laureate and a central figure in the poetry world, brings his passionate intelligence to "The Best American Poetry 2001." In his engaging introduction, Hass writes that after sifting through dozens of literary magazines, he "found that there were large numbers of poems that gave me pleasure, seemed to have inventive force, or intellectual passion or surprise." The works he selected are diverse in every way and have only their excellence in common. Ranging from the traditional to the innovative, the book features important new poems from Anne Carson, Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, Robert Pinsky, and Adrienne Rich; rare posthumous works by Elizabeth Bishop and James Schuyler; and poems by marvelous newcomers like Amy England, Olena Kalytiak Davis, and Rachel Zucker.

With comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's always entertaining foreword assessing the current state of the art, "The Best American Poetry 2001" is a book every reader of poetry will want to have.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Hass (Sun Under Wood) offers some pleasures but few real surprises in this solid 14th installment of the ever-popular annual series. As always, a famous guest editor (Hass), series editor David Lehman (The Daily Mirror, etc.), and their assistants cull 75 poems by American writers from the previous year's run of journals: Lehman and Hass each add a short foreword, and the poets themselves send in "notes and comments," with which the volume concludes. Plenty of poets here are already famous Elizabeth Bishop, who died in 1979, appears with a revealingly unburnished, posthumously published poem from the New Yorker; Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell, Jorie Graham, Louise Glck, Robert Creeley, Anne Carson, Robert Bly, John Ashbery and the new American laureate, Billy Collins, also turn up. So do the influential and richly rewarding poets Rae Armantrout and Lyn Hejinian, whose appearance here would once have been a surprise. (Opinions will differ on whether Hass should have included Brenda Hillman, to whom he is married.) As those who know Hass's own work might expect, his selections from lesser-known creators (like James Richardson) tend toward the expansive and meditative, with room for brief prose poems and extended comedy. And the volume as a whole as Hass's preface admits skews slightly older, and farther towards stars, than some previous Best Americans have (though not Rita Dove's entry from last year). The younger writers that are here including Lee Ann Brown, Christopher Edgar, Thomas Sayers Ellis ("some readings you really could hear/ a rat piss on cotton"), Noelle Kocot and Dean Young are energetic and accessible. Readers familiar with poetry according to Agni, APR, Fence and Verse, leavened here with a smattering of the old school, may not find much to discover; for others, this book is an excellent guide to the changing of the po-biz guard. Either way, it will be one of the top-selling poetry titles this year.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This 15th annual sampling of the year's best magazine verse is as much about the state of poetry publishing in this country as it is about the poems themselves. It shows how much appreciation we owe to the discerning, indefatigable poetry editors of our literary magazines, from Paris Review and The New Yorker to Pequod and Quarter After Eight, who bring us not only the high-quality work we have come to expect from familiar names but also some terrific poems by lesser knowns. Poets who make it into Lehman's series get more exposure than most, which is why there's always some quibbling about the selections. But no one can quarrel with the choice of Elizabeth Bishop, whose posthumous "Vague Poem" is one of the great joys here. Also enjoyable are "Tattoos," a long, witty narrative by J.D. McClatchy, and Amy England's "The Art of the Snake Story." Fortunately, there are plenty more where these came from, and it is certainly handy to have recent work by the likes of Kenneth Koch, Louise Gleck, Adrienne Rich, and Yusef Komunyakaa all in one place. Recommended for most libraries. Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1996- edition (August 21, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743203836
• ISBN-13: 978-0743203838
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,542,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Buyer: Be Aware, September 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Best American Poetry 2001 (Paperback)

I was terribly disappointed by this collection. I am an avid fan of the "Best of..." series, both the short story and poetry annual collections, and wished I had read through this collection before I purchased it. That would have told me just how much "intellectual passion" as opposed to "pleasure" these poems would present. There is a lot of poetry of ideas and form and what feels like postmodern self-conscious gimmickry, but little true emotion or connection to the human experience. And no, I am not an "old fogey moon-june" poetry lover. I love experimentation in poetry. But I feel hoodwinked by Hass' choices (and hey-why didn't he tell us in his nice introduction that his wife was in here!??). Much of this is a poetry in love with language and ideas, but not the connection they must make with sensation and experience in order to move a reader. It's not that the poems are difficult to read through--much great poetry is after all, and much great poetry originally broke the "rules"-- but many of these poems I found thoroughly, frustratingly, truly incomprehensible until I read the author comments in the back. And these notes were at times laughable in their ostentation and/or pitiable in their affectedness. They explain the poem in many cases, but what were we expected to do without these author remarks? In fact, some of these author comments read like indispensable footnotes, not enlightenment on the artistic experience.
All is not lost. The Ashberry and Bishop and Koch, among others, are marvelous, and proof that a great poet doesn't need afterwords or explanatory remarks and footnotes in order to make meaning out of their poetry. And since Ashberry, for example, rarely makes "sense" in the obvious way, it is not that events need to be spelled out in order of poetry to be moving. But it must have an element of emotion in order to please this reader, not just language that sounds good put together or ideas that only mean something to the writer and must be explained in detail.
Anyway, there are many out there who will certainly love this collection-mostly critics and graduate students and professors, is my guess (and I just graduated recently from a writing program, so I know whereof I speak). But more and more these people determine the direction poetry is taking, so it is informative to read this collection for that reason if none other. But save your money if any of my comments mean something to you, or at least read through this at the bookstore before buying.
If you are disappointed by this collection, try the "Best of American Poetry..." that anthologizes the earlier decades. It is a wonderful collection.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another fantastic installment, September 24, 2001

By 

Michael A. Schiavo (Johnson, Vermont) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best American Poetry 2001 (Paperback)

BAP 2001 continues the tradition established by previous volumes by presenting great poetry from well-known, lesser-known, and unknown American poets.

True, no annual volume of poetry can collect all of the "best" poems published that year, but the BEST AMERICAN POETRY series comes awfully close. This collection is just as diverse as past collections: John Ashbery shuffles alongside Thomas Sayers Ellis, Billy Collins plays in the snow, Anne Carson longs, watching Christopher Edgar drifting in the clouds. Donald Hall's poem "Her Garden" is heartbreaking and nearly perfect. Yusef Komunyakaa, Haryette Mullen, and Robert Bly also show up and there's a beautiful banter abounding.

David Lehman has written another funny and insightful foreword and Robert Hass fulfills the guest editor's job of distancing himself as much as possible from the claim of the series' title.

This is a fantastic collection, an indespensible series, and one that should be read if you want to discover the current, vibrant, thriving state of American poetry.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars pretty academic, January 29, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Best American Poetry 2001 (Paperback)

If, very generally, the world is divided into experimental-elliptical and narrative-lyric poetry, then Hass, who has finally realized poetry has changed since he was a boy, is trying to reflect that. Everyone knows these books aren't really books of bests, they're books of trends and tend to be a bit behind the curve. Admitting that, there's no reason to be getting excited here. Rita Dove's was good, this one's eh. It's not the preponderance of more oblique, non-narrative stuff that's the problem--there's a fair amount of dreary gabble, but there are also some electric pieces--Szporluk's series of metaphors has energy, though the last two lines are right out of I-am-woman-hear-me-roar; Lydia Davis is intense and nifty and fun; etc., etc. Where Hass falls down on the job is in picking poetry of more traditional pleasures: most of the clearer narrative pieces are sentimental and unenergetic. It's as if to Hass, the new can only be the elliptical--can't be in a narrative mode that has different sound, sentiment or idea from what he does himself. Alan Feldman's piece, for example, is a namedropping and overlong bit of tripe the point of which seems to be the poet reassuring himself that his mother loved him. Of course there are Kalytiak-Davis, Anne Carson, McHugh, Stewart and a few others who are working outside all the usual boxes, and their work is always fun to read. Gluck is the real thing, and her poem Time is, I think, from her latest book, which is her best so far. Young is fun, as usual; Bernard Welt's "I stopped writing poetry" might be the freshest, funniest and also--to poets anyhow--poignant thing in here. Sayers Ellis is fine--he's a good poet--though I've seen other work by him that I like much more. But other than that you could almost go through this book and say, without checking the bios, this one teaches here, this one got their mfa here, and do it almost to the date. That is to say, what an academic bunch of stuff! I guess that's a pretty accurate reflection of what's going on today, but I think Dove, last year, produced an anthology which found more new voices which couldn't be pigeonholed quite as easily, while her taste in older voices at least tended to lead her to their better stuff.