Customer Reviews

The Best American Poetry 2008: Series Editor David Lehman, Guest Editor Charles Wright

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The Best American Poetry 2008: Series Editor David Lehman, Guest Editor Charles Wright (Best American Poetry) collects works of over seventy poets, in alphabetical order from Tom Andrews to Kevin Young. Tim Ross'a phrase about "sculptors sanding away at the monolith" is a pretty good way to characterize the verse, mostly free, in these pages. The volume is nearly all solemnity and heft. To suggest that Erica Dawson's "Go on, and gag on your own gravity--" sums up the selection nicely would be very wrong however. The prevailing gravitas feels right in our sober, unsettled and even eerie post-9/11 world.

Some of my favorties in this collection are: "Evening Song," by Tom Andrews, "Wanting Sumptuous Heavens," by Robert Bly, "Rock Polisher," by Chris Forhan, "Threshing," by Louise Glueck, "Snoring," by Mark Jarman, "Resignation," by J. D. McClatchy, "World News," by Sharod Santos, "Hexagon: On Truth," by Dave Snyder, "Thomas Hardy," by Lee Upton, and "No Forgiveness Ode," by Dean Young.

David Young's "The Dead from Iraq," begins, "They come back and stand in our midst." He calls them "vague sentinals, stiff at attention." These poems also stand in the readers' midst and seem to form a more ragged phantom line in the mind, challenging and chastisizing.

This year the job was done very well. The works were pulled from unique sources regardless of the place (a theological review & the New York Review of Books etc.) & the writers were focused upon. John Ashbery is in this year's work as well as the entire Dark Room Collective. I saw Kevin Young's poem appear in Poetry & knew this would be included. They did a good crunch time job of uniting all the sources & strongest writers of our generation to pull together the best work. Kudos to Lehman & Wright.

Just a note: This is my third year buying the collection & it's the best I've seen, Gluck, Trethewey, Young, everyone basically.

I thought 2006 was dominated by Kay Ryan's poem.
I thought 2007 was focused upon "sounds" as opposed to word choice.

& this years collection is focused upon voice.

Either Charles Wright has a nose for sniffing out pretension or it was a very grounded year. There are poems here I appreciate by big names (ie oldsters), which ain't always the case - Ashbery, Marvin Bell, Frank Bidart; Hass, Hoagland, even (help!) a Hicok and a Bernstein I like (I've been trashing their recent books). There are the slightly-below-the radar mid-rankers - hello, Lydia Davis! And then there are the spanking new names, which it would be invidious to start rattling off - good luck to 'em all

If your only experience with this series is the unfortunate Best American Poetry 2007, then Best American Poetry 2008 might not be enough to persuade you of the value of this series or the worth of contemporary poetry. But I would urge you at least to give it a chance. In his introduction, editor Charles Wright refreshingly forewarns us that he likes "things to make sense" and that we shouldn't look for "language games, intellectual rip-offs, or rhetorical sing-alongs," all ideas that made me optimistic about the book's contents (and made me wonder if he was referring to the noted weakness of the 07 version). For the most part Wright stays true to his word, as a good number of these poems both please the ear and excite the mind. The clash of styles among the poems can be jarring--an inevitable flaw in any series of this nature--but that does not take away from the individual successes you find inside. Oddly the poems seem to be weakest in the middle (purely an accident of its alphabetical structure), when the unnecessary obscurity of so much contemporary poetry supplants the heartfelt intensity Wright seemed to be seeking. Everyone will have their favorites, of course, which is why I would recommend you take a look at the book--it won't please everyone, but everyone should be able to find something pleasing somewhere inside.

I am not a great fan of anthologies, but I always make an exception for this series. Each annual collection is framed by the guest editor's sensibilities. Each includes provocative essays by series editor David Lehman as well as the guest editor. While one may argue both with poems included and excluded each year, over time the series provides a lively collection of contemporary American poetry.

Since this is an anthology I didn't expect to like all the poems and I didn't; although several were outstanding. Some poems didn't seem to fall into any format regarding theme or style. Is this the best of new, new, modern poetry? Maybe the editor and I just don't like the same type of writing.

It's hard to format poetry
for the Kindle
isn't it?
This book shows you
what that looks like