The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry: Sixty-Five Outstanding Poets [Paperback]

J.D. McClatchy (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 1990

Dazzling in its range, exhilarating in its immediacy and grace, this collection gathers together, from every region of the country and from the past forty years, the poems that continue to shape our imaginations. From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Gluck, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry's daring energies and its tender understandings.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Poetry devotees will be familiar with much of the work in this fine collection, which focuses on the period from WW II until the present. Sixty-five poets, including such well-known writers as Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, James Dickey, Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder, are represented by anywhere from one to a dozen poems each, as well as a brief biography that touches on the writer's aesthetic ideas. McClatchy, himself a poet and critic, has done an exceptional job of selecting works that typify the poets' styles and beliefs. Standouts are Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," about the poet's first perception of herself in relation to others; Randall Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo," which deals with the dull, emotionless routine of modern life; Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke with You," a dizzy declaration of love during a visit to a New York museum; and Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole," in which the poet sees his presence in the world as subtracting from the whole of reality. Unfortunately, the poems are not dated, giving the reader no sense of the writers' chronological development.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Alluding to the anthology wars of a generation ago, McClatchy writes in his introduction that his choices are strictly nonpartisan (neither "Paleface or Redskin, or Academic and Avant-Garde"). But from the 65 poets he has selected to represent the course of American poetry over the last half century--beginning with Robert Lowell and ending with Jorie Graham--it is clear his preferences are formalistic and academic. The typical poem a reader will encounter in these pages is urbane, finely honed, and smoothly accomplished. As in all anthologies, the omissions and inclusions are telling. Where are Rexroth, Kees, and Rukeyser? Why Cunningham, Bowers, Feldman, and Garrigue and not Ignatow, Brooks, Blackburn, and Bly? While it is a delight to have many of the poets McClatchy has chosen collected together in a reasonably priced edition, a greater variety of voice and aesthetic would have made this anthology a livelier survey of the state of contemporary American poetry. Still, it is a useful addition to most collections. For the 100 most anthologized poems in English, see review of The Concise Columbia Book of Poetry, p. 74.--Ed.
- Christine Sten strom, New York Law Sch. Lib.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st edition (October 31, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679728589
• ISBN-13: 978-0679728580
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #807,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile read for poetry enthusiasts., January 17, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry: Sixty-Five Outstanding Poets (Paperback)

The poet Robert Wallace said, "No magic, no poem." In this collection, edited by J.D. McClatchy, there is enough magic to power a year's worth of David Copperfield performances. Bringing together the disparate but somehow harmonious voices of Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Jorie Graham, Elizabeth Bishop and sixty-one other outstanding contemporary poets, this collection provides a wonderful overview of our country's modern poetry movement. Such classics as Plath's "Daddy" and Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra" can be found alongside works by Denise Levertov, Edward Hirsch and the beautifully imagistic James Schuyler. Poetry these days, particularly as represented on the 'net, seems to have become gritty and ultra-confessional. It is a pleasure to read a work where the poets employ the old-fashioned devices of metaphor and imagery to create powerful emotions in the reader and to express something of their own inner lives. Highly recommended!

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can you have a "Vintage" book of "Contemporary" poems?, August 3, 2002

By 

M. Swinney "Marc My Words" (Flower Mound, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry: Sixty-Five Outstanding Poets (Paperback)

Besides the seemingly at odds title, this book is pretty indispensable as far as poetry anthologies go. To even people that love and follow poetry the muddle of 20th and 21st century poetry writers can leave one scratching one's head fuddled at where to begin. This collection edited by J.D. McClatchy is perhaps the best place to start.

This book is a smorgasbord of modern day poets. It turned me on to such vastly different talents as Ginsberg, Robert Penn Warren, and Mark Strand. It starts with Robert Lowell telling us, "I want words meat-hooked from the living steer, but a cold flame of tinfoil licks the metal log, beautiful unchanging fire of vision..." and ends with Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Covered with snow, and snow in clouds above it, And drifts and swirls too deep to understand. Still, I must try to think a little of it, with so much winter in my head and hand." There is a description of each writer straightforward and unpretentious. In its compactness, 65 writers are covered with each represented by 3-14 poems each.

I was pretty surprised to see only one review written for this book here on Amazon. I sure hope more people are owning, reading, and cherishing this book than reviewing it because to let it fall by the wayside would be something literally tragic. It's a jumping off point, a springboard. A beginning to discovery of writers and word, beautiful, unique, gymnastically agile words. We like it so much, we have two copies, one I had for myself and one I bought for my wife before we were married. Now which one will I read tonight?

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful despite its flaws, November 13, 2006

By 

Sarang Gopalakrishnan (Urbana, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (Paperback)

This book is decidedly an anthology of poets rather than poems: everyone gets at least three pages and a half-page introduction. It's also fairly encyclopedic and catholic. The main use of an anthology of this type is to give the interested reader a quick idea of what, say, Merwin or Ashbery or Clampitt is all about. This task it discharges quite well.

Now for the flaws. There are some idiosyncratic omissions, which hurt the book; regardless of what McClatchy thinks of Robert Bly, he should have included a few of his poems and let the reader judge for himself. Similarly with Stanley Kunitz. I assume McClatchy likes Thom Gunn and left him out for being British, which is a little silly because he spent most of his life in California. These omissions make the book a little less complete as a reference.

More seriously, the anthology is a hard slog because so many of the poems are at least a couple of pages long. This means you can't dip in at random and read a poem and be surprised -- which is what anthologies are traditionally for. It would be a more readable book if there were fewer interminable blank verse meditations, many of them unengaging and not very characteristic -- e.g. one would not realize from the selections that Merrill and Hecht were masters of poetic form. That said, one does get some idea of each voice if one persists.

A persistent pattern in this period is the mid-career switch from highly formal verse to a distinctive personal style. (Lowell, Berryman, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Plath...) It's fascinating to see the mature style next to the earlier style; the book does this sometimes, but not with Merwin.

On the whole this anthology is a slightly unhappy medium. It would have served its purpose better if it had been more conventional; on the other hand I'd have really liked to see an unabashedly personal anthology that more vividly reflected McClatchy's own tastes. Still, what we have is a useful introduction to a very rich period.