Customer Reviews

The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman

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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.

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.

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.

This is just more of the same. There are a few spectacular poems, but Wagoner does the same mediocre job that the previous editors have done. When is Lehman gonna get a Dana Gioia, R.S. Gwynn, Kim Addonizio, Dave Mason, or AE Stallings to bring this series up to what it should be?

I have read lots of poetry for many years, but I was very turned off by this book. I could make no sense at all out of the first few poems in this book, and gave up.

I don't see how some of these poems got published anywhere. These can't be the best. They seem more like the worst poems.

Anthologies that claim to consist of the "best" works in any genre are always going to be subject to critical scrutiny and debate. That happens almost every year with THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY series, and even a cursory look at the print reviews for the 2009 volume, demonstrates that last year's edition was no exception. I actually understand some of the points critics make about this series. There is--often--a kind of "in group" sensibility at work in coming up with a number of the selections. Nevertheless, I usually see enough in the way of the unexpected, the startlingly original and really enough new voices to always look forward to this annual collection. I nearly always seem to find much in them to recommend in them. If that seems at all wishy-washy, so be it.

Guest editor David Wagoner had the unenviable task of selecting the 75 "best" poems published in American journals over the past year. That's never easy, and certainly nothing most sane people would ever consider doing. But he has done a good job in setting a tone (he is partial toward the conversational, though not the overly chatty), establishing a flow, and in balancing the selection so that the works of lesser known poets are included alongside those by such luminaries as John Ashbery, Billy Collins and Adrienne Rich.

Is it really the BEST AMERICAN POETRY? That's a pointless question, of course. What's useful about any anthology is that it gets the conversation going. What should have been included? Who's over-/underrated? Where can I find more by this or that writer? If you like her, you may want to check out him, etc. That's what I appreciate about this annual collection. And I invite anyone to consider these efforts in just that spirit.

It takes work to put together an anthology like "The Best American Poetry 2009." The editor, in this case David Wagoner, reads scores of literary journals (online and print), general publications, and books of poetry, sifting through literally thousands of poems to select 75 that he or she considers the best of the year.

Wagoner, a poet, former poet editor and university professor, has chosen works by poets both well known and not-so-well-known, works that are simple and works that are complex, poems that vary in style and substance and subject and purpose. Represented here are established and broadly recognized poets like John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Adrienne Rich and Philip Levine, and younger and newer poets as well.

It's inevitable, in a collection like this, that a reader will find favorites. One of mine is "In Winter" by P. Hurshell, which begins this way:

I know the crooked at once. How it tries
to circle, catch a sudden pale gleam,
how it sparks a pearly surprise
against the sky, its silhouette
making a little bend

just before the sun is visible. The straight
is harder. No curves, no beckoning,
just unendingly in the place

we're used to. It's not exactly
boring..."

Another favorite is "Open Field" by Phillis Levin, which ends this way:

O, said the crow,
but didn't you know:

I
am a drop

Of the bottomless well,
you are a mark in the snow.

There's "Red" by Mary Oliver, in which she describes the finding of gray foxes on separate mornings on the highway; she removes them to a nearby field "while the cars kept coming." And a story poem entitled "On Mercy" by Kevin Prufer, which begins with a man being executed by firing squad and then proceeds to explore the relationships enfolding the dead man. And a poem by Jeanne Murray Walker called "Holding Action" that's about memory and mortality and includes lines like these:

Years from now I want to remember
how we walked the splendid earth
and saw it. When children read this
and smile at its old-fashioned vision,
then words, stubborn little boxcars

lugging meaning across the rickety
wood bridge to the future, hold,
hold...

What a delightfully insightful way to describe words - "stubborn little boxcars lugging meaning."

David Wagoner has done well in making his selections, illustrating the diversity and creativity that is American poetry today. (And a hat tip to series editor David Lehman, who started this series in 1988, for selecting Wagoner for 2009 and for carrying this project on for more than two decades.)

The one earlier review strikes me as being written by someone who does not understand poetry and so compensates by posting an unfavorable review in which he continulally whines about how poor the poetry is, for the simple reason that many of the poems seem to be over his head. You would do well to ignore him and instead read this anthology.

Excellent eclectic selection of poetry for any mood or situation. A worthwhile addition to a poetry collection.

for here and now, this is how - yes and a little no.
good price good text, interesting but not always inspiring.
Shout to the Lord, all the earth let us sing:
Power and majesty, praise to the King.
Mountains bow down and the seas will roar
At the sound of Your name.