Customer Reviews

The Best American Poetry 2005

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"Your burglaries leave no thumbprint
Mine, too, are silent
I do my best imagining at night,
And you do yours with the help of shadows.

Like actors rehearsing a play,
The dark ones withdrew
Into remote corners of the room
The rest of us sat in expectation
Of your burning oratory."

~ from Sunlight by Charles Simic

The maturity of the poems in The Best American Poetry 2005 is instantly apparent the moment you read "In View of the Fact" by A.R. Ammons. This is a deeply thoughtful collection of poems best addressed when you are in a contemplative mood. Within the pages there are many surprises, lovely conclusions and especially creative thought patterns. Sexuality and death seem to be themes throughout, but there is also humor and cleverly designed rhymes the wittiest poets must long to master.

"Ants" by Vicki Hudspith is especially comical while Mary Karr's poem about her son is especially heart-warming and leans more towards a serious realization of life's complexity within expectation. Richard Garcia's "Adam and Eve's Dog" lightens a topic most would find quite serious and Edward Field's poem of praise has a beautiful freeing conclusion with metaphorical appeal.

"If I were Japanese I'd write about magnolias
in March, how tonal, each bud long as a pencil,
sheathed in celadon suede, jutting from a cluster
of glossy leaves. I'd end the poem before anything
bloomed, end with rain swelling the buds
and the sheaths bursting, then falling to the grass
like a fairy's castoff slippers, like candy wrappers,
like spent firecrackers."
~ Beth Ann Fennelly, pg. 46

What I am most impressed by in this collection of poems, is the truthfulness and the straightforward invitation into this sincerity. There is a cleverness in the crafting of each idea (I Want to be Your Shoebox) and at times profound lessons can appear through the viewpoint of a poet who sees the world a little more intensely (The Poets March on Washington). Jane Hirshfield's "Burlap Sack" paints an image of bondage and freedom, while Linda Pastan reveals a different type of cultural freedom.

Paul Muldoon's selections also provide a consistent mood and his love for rhyme and complex sentence structures invites you into a world of poems that reveal intricate details of your own life. At times his selections are realistic and edgy with mature considerations and at other times he has selected profound moments to inspire a more heartfelt appreciation for beauty. Both ideas seem to weave together to form a painting of how life is really lived in a realistic setting, as opposed to a more romantic rendering of ideas within a dreamscape of fantasy poems. Now and then, a line in a poem is so highly significant you can read the entire poem and then suddenly awaken upon a stunning moment.

"Wanting the tight buds of my loneliness
to swell and split, not die in wanting.
It was why I rushed through everything,
why I tore away at the perpetual gauze
between me and the stinging world"
~ pg. 133, Chase Twichell

I can also highly recommend the 2006 edition of The Best American Poetry, which is enhanced with pop culture references and a distinctly contemporary mood. As with all the books edited by David Lehman, the "Foreword" is well worth reading. David Lehman's experience in the world of poetry reveals ideas that will be of great interest to anyone interested in poetry culture.

~The Rebecca Review

Of The Best American Poetry anthologies published, this is one I recommend. Paul Muldoon is not my favorite poetry editor, but he did offer a great sampling of contemporary poetry. The Steve Orlen poem included in this anthologhy is worth the price of the book. There are three Best American Poetry anthologies I use to teach poetry, and this is one of them.

it is hard to imagine a poet wordier than muldoon, "guest editor," but evidently there are, alphabetically ordered, a platoon of them. importantly though, paul muldoon is surely gifted, or has been in some previous life, some life here shed in evident order to stand naked and distressingly unashamed in the heated gaze of the passle of muldoon-ettes that he ostensibly (it is hard to imagine but is evidently so) has selected as representatives of a year's worth of american poetic effort. Surprise: most of them sound rather like Muldoon. Though it is a Muldoon non compos mentis and otherwise compromised by the blind staggers. Perhaps he was sidelined in recovery somewhere and assigned the rounding up of poets to a sightless underling. With few exceptions the poems aboard this sinking ship specialize in congealed imagery; that is, great slovenly gobbets of verbiage fast frozen at sea in the hope they would "pass." Poems impossible to decipher (by dint of having been composed with clarity farthest from anyone's mind), and unlikely to inspire a reader to try. although i am uncomfortable being so sweepingly condemnatory, i would despise myself the more deeply for scrounging after worth in bedlam...that is, in an atmosphere evidently intolerant of pride while unshrinkingly supportive of an over-riding disdain for communication. My apologies to Mr. Muldoon if it is a case of his name being used without permission.

BAP2005 surely is a high point for the quality of the volume's poetry and the number of internet offerings included.

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