Customer Reviews

Contemporary American Poetry (Penguin Academics)

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This is a great anthology. It should come to no surprise, since R.S. Gwynn is a well-respected anthologist, and has the highly successful Longman Pocket series (I highly recommend his Longman Poetry: A Pocket Anthology). And April Lindner brings a nice sensibility to this project. They cover the full range of poets and poetic schools, each with header notes. And unlike many other anthologies of contemporary poetry that I've seen, this one is affordable and has one of the best mixes of poets I've seen. My only complaint is that you won't find any poems by either Gwynn or Lindner within, and both are phenomenal poets. But I understand that they had limited space and chose to cut themselves out. Hopefully in the next edition...

So, if you are looking for a good introduction to contemporary American poetry, you won't find a finer anthology than this one. I highly recommend you add it to your shelves.

One of the joys of reading a poetry anthology, is the likely hood of encountering a previously unknown poet. You read the lines, you hear the music, you come to the end of the poem and you wonder, "Hmmm. Where have you been all my life?" The Contemporary American Poetry allows the reader to gobble up many of these moments. So you re-read poems by Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, Anne Sexton. But then you find David St. John with his narrative portrait of a wizened Mme. Descartes; or David Mason's chilling
The Collector's Tale, another narrative poem that is full of power and reflections.

Many of the poets in this anthology are still living. Many were born in the 40s and 50s and their voices reflect the framework of the periods of the 60s- 90s. But the reader can still touch base with Plath's The Colossus or Ginsberg's A Supermarket in California. It is like a great poetry buffet, where some of the classics ---- the caviars,
the chilled salmon, the duck confit --- are there for the tasting, but one can also move along to the nouvelle cuisine, the raw fish, the sauced wild morels.

The book is handsomely laid out; the fonts are graceful and crisp; a poet's brief biography introduces each poem. Whether one is a regular reader of poetry or someone who wants to get an introduction to a range of poets, the Penguin Academics Contemporary American Poetry volume will provide a satisfying meal indeed.

This may once have been a viable anthology for personal enjoyment and classroom teaching, but the version currently available is produced by on-demand printing, and the quality is worse than cheap. The paper is stiff, the lines are broken, the text is printed on an angle, the shaded area on the title page is the gray of a poor photocopy, and the words and images on the front and back cover are fuzzy. It's just embarrassing.

(I bought a copy on Amazon and was so appalled I returned it, then checked with the publisher who sent me another copy just as bad and explained that on-demand printing helps them keep less popular books from going out of print.)