From Library Journal
Beginning with an essay that establish es the seriousness and diversity of po ets' ``imaginative claims'' to personal territory, Vendler presents poets who preserve American culture that would lapse unrecorded were it not for art. She chooses 35 exponents of that voicefrom Wallace Stevens and Langston Hughes through Jorie Gra ham and Rita Dove. Diverse as the se lection is, readers are bound to ask about the missingGalway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Bly. Each poet is represented with a generous sam pling; brief biographies appear at the end. It is Vendler's wish that these po ems will provoke a ``sharp and relieving pang'' from the reader: ```Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!''' (Eliza beth Bishop). Rosaly DeMaios Roff man, English Dept., Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
For a statement of how poetry exists and how we come to it, these 7,000 words [in the preface] cannot be bettered...Then there's the question of difficulty, and Helen Vendler is admirable again...Those, and her more particular statements about new American poets and their interrelations, are worth the book's price. So, on the whole, are the poems. (Hugh Kenner
Boston Globe )
Towards the end of her multi-faceted introductory essay, Helen Vendler says that she has made "a sampling of what to my taste seems satisfying" in the great flood of recent American poetry. Since she is one of the foremost critics of poetry in America, her taste has more than purely personal significance. In fact, her "sampling" amounts to a progress report on what has happened in American poetry from the 1950s to the present. (Peter Hainsworth
Times Literary Supplement )
[Vendler] is at her best when discussing the history of formal changes within poems themselves. Her thoughts on endings, (i.e. contemporary release from resounding closure) are illuminating, ingeniously conceived as a "tentativeness of gesture," a response to society's pluralism of view...[She] pinpoint[s] "the absence of the transcendent" as American poetry's most haunting loss and enumerates post-modernist strengths in her most intriguing, elliptical style...Vendler's anthology does what most anthologies do: It gives poets and critics more cause for argument--and perhaps provides new insight into which lyrics...can be called truly American. (Carol Muske
Los Angeles Times Book Review )
The anthology that Vendler has assembled...is both personal and revisionist, revealing her particular vision of the canon of recent American poetry (though Vendler of course knows that it is not critics or anthologists in the end who determine our canons)...On the crucial question to be asked of a collection like this--how well does it represent the best developments in the era it covers? Vendler has done her work so well that it will surely be many years before anyone does it better. (
Yale Review )
In her present capacity as poetry review for the
New Yorker, and (in the past) for the
New York Times Book Review, Helen Vendler has been most influentially involved in deciding exactly which volumes are to be deemed memorable. She is the best close reader of poems to found on the literary pages, and she exercises, by common consent, a powerful role in the establishment of poetic reputation on the trans-Atlantic scene. She is judicious but not mealy-mouthed and operates with as firm a sense of what she would resist as what she favours. (Seamus Heaney
The Observer )
