The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman [Paperback]

David Wagoner (Editor), David Lehman (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2009 | Series: Best American Poetry

Award-winning poet David Wagoner and renowned editor David Lehman present the twenty-second edition of the Best American Poetry series—"a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title" (Chicago Tribune).

Eagerly anticipated by scholars, students, readers, and poets alike, Scribner’s Best American Poetry series has achieved brand-name status in the literary world, serving as a yearly guide to who’s who in American poetry. Known for his marvelous narrative skill and humane wit, David Wagoner is one of the few poets of his generation to win the universal admiration of his peers. Working in conjunction with series editor David Lehman, Wagoner brings his refreshing eye to this year’s anthology. With new work by established poets, such as Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Mark Doty, and Bob Hicok, The Best American Poetry 2009 also features some of tomorrow’s leading luminaries. Readers of all ages and backgrounds will treasure this illuminating collection of modern American verse.

With its high-profile editorship and its generous embrace of American poetry in all its exuberant variety, the Best American Poetry series continues to be, as Robert Pinsky says, "as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be."

 

 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. From the moment series editor David Lehman invokes the myth of Jacob wrestling the Angel in his introduction, the gloves are off in this year's installment of this popular annual anthology. Lehman devotes much of his introduction to throwing jabs at longtime sparring partner and professional poetry grump William Logan, whom Lehman calls wounded and thin skinned. Guest editor Wagoner chooses to abstain from the scuffle, but there's no denying the aesthetic character amassed by the poems he's selected: American poets not only want to talk about their country this year, they want to talk violence in (and toward) their country. They came to blow up America, writes John Ashbery, followed hard on his heels by Mark Bibbins, who warns our fifth state, Connecticut! we're sawing you in half. Denise Duhamel envisions How It Will End (We look around, but no one is watching us) and Rob Cook, in his bold and incantatory Song of America, tells us, I'm raising my child to drown and drop dead and to carry buildings on his back. It appears our poets are at last ready to confront the hysteria and violence of the past eight years, and who can say there's a better year than 2009 to begin. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

David Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the author of seven books of poetry, including When a Woman Loves a Man. He lives in New York City.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 2009 edition (September 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743299779
• ISBN-13: 978-0743299770
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #169,828 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars More of the same, November 19, 2009

By 

Erica Bell (Washington State) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman (Paperback)

Poetry's inexorable drift toward the chatty and mundane--as well as its obsession with politicized art--is as perfectly demonstrated in this anthology as any other today. Of course, these days poetry just makes us yawn, and we pause only infrequently to waste time building up an angry head of steam. What's the point, after all? Form and elequence, understatement with a nod to anything like a universal audience is just so passé, dahling. Poets (but mostly their editors) have snarked, harangued and marginalized themselves out of a popular audience.

But still the anthologies keep coming, because nobody has the $50 to subscribe to obscure little journals anymore. Poets have to publish SOMEWHERE. And since there are so many now, unconstrained by talent or...heck, restraint, they're dressed up here, ready to be given for the holidays.

A couple of them are even good. I liked Lance Larsen's "Why Do You Keep Putting Animals In your Poems?", and if his title smacks of smug self-reference, his language doesn't. "Badgers rarely invent stories to make them / Sad about their bodies", he smiles. And he goes on, beautifully: "My happiness / Is like a flock of sparrows that scatters when a bus / Drives by, then restrings itself two blocks away". Isn't that lovely?

Denise Duhamel's "How It Will End" defies the modern trend. Its universal theme and delicious ending strike a Billy Collins delight in absurdity. Collins, too, is here (isn't he always?) and my son smiled when I read him Collins' "The Great American Poem". Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe "The Lanyard" is the G.A.P. And that was years ago.

The Contributers' Comments and Notes are, predictably and tellingly, thicker than the poems. In them, poets hold forth, filling you in on that trip to Venice, or the time the cat caught a mouse and they cried. The stand-alone poem--where we possess all the societal commonality we need to relate to it, where the language, form and metaphor wrap us in the divine, and when each time in our lives we read it, we grow a little more--is, for the first time in Western history, a long-gone dream. I fear we will never see its like again.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A few smiles, but mostly forgettable, November 20, 2009

By 

A. J. Sutter (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman (Paperback)

It's been three or four years since I last read in this series, so I can't speak to whether it's an improvement over its most recent predecessors. This edition lacks long poems or anything particularly moving, arresting, or, for that matter, infuriating. At best there were a few that made me smile (among them Denise Duhamel, Richard Howard, James Richardson (albeit with a very arch, very The New Yorker poem), Matthew Zapruder (the ending)), and a couple that were formally clever (Ronald Wallace, especially). There are also some duds by famous names (e.g., Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver), with W.S. Merwin's more admirable than lovable and John Ashberry's entertaining but, by his own admission, sort of lazy. Billy Collins's contribution did not impress me as much as it did other reviewers. A few poems inspired by the Holocaust, the Iraq War or other awful historical events were among the weakest. And some of the contributors' notes tell you more than you need to know. The book is more of a palate-cleanser than a main course; you'll be able to get through most or all of it on a cross-country flight, which seems like an appropriate venue for reading it.

My indifference to most of this anthology may have been biased by the fact that I had been dipping into Montale's early work (Ossi di seppia/Cuttlefish Bones) a few days before picking up this book. To say that's a much better way to spend your time (e.g., in Jonathan Galassi's bilingual version) is a wild understatement, but maybe you'll find it a helpful steer nonetheless.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, July 23, 2011

By 

S. Girard (NH, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman (Paperback)

There are so many good writers out there and many of them are in this book. Some of the works included will leave you wordless and amazed.