David Lehman Books

Nearly every edition in this series contains I like and poems I hate. It really does depend on the editor's tastes. Since Hass is big on ambiguity, language poetry, and fragmented narratives, many of the poems here follow that. My favorites include: Bly, Rich, Lydia Davis, James Galvin. I think overall this is one of the top few books in this series. I can already see that I'm not going to like the 2002 edited by Creeley

"We're bent in the garden planting spring bulbs, pulling up
weeds, and I'm wondering how much longer we'll crouch here
on our knees in the damp soil sorting things out. Guardians
of shrubs and flowers, the first wild cyclamen sipping the sun.
We watch over each other as we watch over our garden,
woolly branches of cacti, fiery pokers of aloes in winter.
Especially during a long drought, after a snowfall, or following
the arcs of missiles on our screen. Flurries of extra caring.
Some mornings we hang on to each other as if we're afraid to let go."
~ pg. 126, Shirley Kaufman

The fascination I currently have with The Best American Poetry series seems born of my curiosity to see how each editor creates a world of poetry they feel possessed to love. The choices made by Robert Hass reflect so accurately his loves and dislikes. You can live in a short moment of his life through reflecting on what it is he enjoys about the selections in this book.

Each poet sees the world so uniquely, but many times they seem to write from a place of loneliness, the desire to speak to another soul of similar substance. This becomes very apparent in the personal stories of pleasure and pain, emotional and real, fresh and trying. At times lines from a poem feel distant and sad while others spring from the page, pouncing on you with the joy of a happy kitten. Poetry has its own rewards and good poetry is the reward for searching through a lot of moments, that while not mediocre to many, may be to you. Your personal taste figures in highly in what you will enjoy and to one person, a poem may mean nothing, and to another, it is the world.

For this reason, I try to view poems from many perspectives. I will say that the poems in this particular volume can be especially perplexing. The truth is, you may read this book one day and feel completely disconnected and come back and read it on another day and wonder what you were thinking.

The mood of this volume is especially intellectual and complex with many literary references, like discussions of the death of Virgina Woolf and the writings of Dostoevsky. The poems are mysteries to be solved and require your full attention and don't seem to immediately welcome you into their intimacy. But then you happen upon a poem like Linda Gregg's "The Singers Change, The Music Goes On" and you know you have happened upon a moment of truth that will endure.

"We live our myth in the recurrence,
pretending we will return another day.
Like the morning coming every morning.
The truth is we come back as a choir."

Allen Grossman's "Enough rain for Agnes Walquist" has some very intriguing thoughts:

" -a smooth stone
passed in a kiss from the mouth
of a Fate into my open mouth
amidst odors of metal
and slamming doors
at the dark end of a railway car
as the train was leaning
on a curve and slowing
to stop-is lost. Lost"

Alice Noteley's poem must be printed sideways because the lines are so long it can't possibly fit on the pages any other way:

"always near the border and never in the snows come again and the purple sinister sky
so I can die and read the books they leave me always alive the letters and the letters letters."

Robert Pinsky's "Jersey Rain has beautiful images of the moon where he talks about "The chilly liquefaction of day to night." James Richardson writes "Ten-second Essays" that are numbered and give you snippets of moments to enjoy and expand upon in your own mind. A few of the lines are quite funny, like: "Say nothing as if it were news" or witty like: "The road not taken is the part of you not taking the road."

Mary Ruefle's "Furtherness" is especially beautiful in the most poignant of ways as she writes about death. The poem I loved the most was "Apple" by Susan Stewart which made me long for the Apple tree in my grandmother's yard.

"You can roast late apples
in the ashes. You can run
them in slices on a stick.
you can turn the stem to
find the letter of your love."

Most poets will find Bernard Welt's "I stopped writing poetry" rather amusing. I loved his line: "It's a terrible thing to receive exactly the attention you want." The entire poem gives insight into why poets write in the first place and any poet could relate to: "still a breeze reaches me from time to time fragrant of verse."

If you read this book and stopped at page 58, you would miss an entire world! I was so happy I kept reading.

~The Rebecca Review

...And if there is a democracy in writing, indeed, it is poetry. The Best American Poetry 2001 is a compilation of great poems from various writers and covers wide range of subjects, from sad to happy and from abstract to everyday situation proems are covered in this great book. Some poems touch your heart, others make you laugh, and some leave an everlasting impact upon you... best part is that all of them co-exist in this great book. This book is the best companion that a young developing poet can have, this book is the best refenrence a mature poet could use... and this very book is something that a very common man can refer to. Poetry starts where prose ends, it can say one paragraph in a few words... it can summarize an article into a stanza. It can trigger a war of words and it has the power to hold great romance in form of sonnets. Poetry is something that all of us associate to... some refer to it in the hour of crisis, the others turn to it in the moment of celebration. This book is indeed deep... it could well be termed a perfect mosaic, an extraordinary collage, a magically colourful painting... one that has been completed by many great artists, and it is a book that could leave an impact of many young writers who could well be the future artists. The Best American Poetry 2001 is a must to read - Its somethig that we have to keep!

want to know why nobody reads poetry anymore? read the first 58 pages of this book and you will know. 58 pages is all of my free time that i could justify wasting. page after page of dull words thrown up by pretentious people with next to nothing to say. truly horrible.

There has been much debate over the past ten years of what constitutes poetry. This book involves a broad scope of what is now considered poetry and why very few people "like" poetry. To sum it up, "good grief!"

i was -pleased with the quick delivery and goon condition of the product thanks don

There are a few poems in this book that are worth reading-- Milton Kessler's "Comma of God," for example-- but most of them are forgettable or nauseating. Some of the poems are so irritating or inept (or both) that you'll want to shove the book into the shredder. More irritating than the poems, though, is the section that contains the contributors' comments. Here's a sample by Thomas Fink: "By entertaining varied perspectives on interpersonal and intergroup conflict and by disrupting continuity between successive sentences, 'Yinglish Strophes IX,' I hope, foregrounds heterogeneous linguistic elements rather than an individual 'voiceprint.'"

If that's your thing, go buy this book.

The poetry that's getting published these days is poorly crafted and underwhelming; this compilation is no exception.

I was incredibly disappointed in this work. The selection of poems as "best" in America in 2007 was stunning in its mediocrity, and even outright poverty. If these are truly the best poems in America, we really are in trouble. I have never written a review before but this terrible book just made me want to cry out in protest.

I've found many of the BAP series to be highly dissapointing. But it is hard to select a best of when it comes to poetry. It really depends on what you like to read. Now, there are some truly awful poems in here, and I'm not sure McHugh was the best choice as an editor, but she really picked some great poems. Sure about a quarter of them are awful, but most are readable or good. And then there are the great ones: Geffrey Brock, Galway Kinnell, Marya Rosenberg, David Shumate, Brian Turner, Charles Harper Webb and Joe Wenderoth. If you love poetry, you've gotta get this one.

As I began to read Part One of this book my first reaction was slight disappointment. I'd enjoyed more recent Lehman poems and been recommended this as his best book; I liked it, but not as much as I'd expected to. It irritated me that he wrote poems in perfect syntax and yet I couldn't always connect the sentences. In poems like "The Square Root of Minus One", "Heaven" and "The Right Number" he isn't working the same surrealist landscape as Mark Strand, but making intuitive leaps between different landscapes that I can't always follow. Then I got into his thirty sonnet sequence "Mythologies" which comprises Part Two of the book, and things began to click: it's necessary to think yourself into Lehman's head, almost. I was particularly taken by sonnet XVIII, where the end words take the form of a word puzzle. My favorite poems were probably those in Part Three, which comprises his wittiest poems: games with cinematography like "Perfidia" and "Henry James: the Movie" and satires like "Rejection Slip", "With Tenure" and "One Size Fits All." I liked the first few poems in Part Four, but all these are first person memoir type poems with a profusion of self-conscious character names and after a while the appeal dissipated. I wonder if I might prefer his more recent books.

This book can be the most commercially successful book of poetry to be ever published if it were used as a cure for insomniacs. Mr. Lehman writes interminably boring lines which ultimately put this reader (and many others) to sleep. -Lucy Greely

This is a dynamite book of poems. My candidate for the most underrated volume of its decade! Favorite poems: "Perfidia," the hilarious anti-tenure tirade "With Tenure," the equally hilarious parody of academic lit crit ("One Size Fits All"), the amazing sequence of "Mythologies," the narrative poems set in the 1970s, etc etc etc. This book rewards multiple readings.

I'm a big fan of David Lehman's work, from his treatise on detective fiction to his many anthologies to his own collections of poetry. Those who appreciate the New York School of Poets' playful humor and goofy energy will enjoy this book (in fact, the poets in the introduction mention John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch's collaborative sestina as an influence). Such an interesting conceit: a co-authored book of sestinas. That alone makes this book worth looking at. After all, how often do you see co-authored books of poetry, and how often a book made up entirely of sestinas, right down to the table of contents? And many of the poems are really good ones, too--this is not just an elaborate gimmick. Lehman and Cummins are two poets who are not "aluminum snores," to borrow Dean Young's description of Robert Lowell. Buy this book.

There are amazing illustrations in this little book. It's disappointing the poem sequence gets tired so quickly. This is an incredibly well-produced looking book whose poems would have been better-served in a chapbook. Lehman and Cummins' offerings are very forgettable and not much fun or funny--what a disappointment. Soft Skull press skimps on books by young poets like Danielle Pafunda and Jennifer L. Knox and does a first-class job producing a book of throw away poems here. What a waste.

I expected quite a bit from this book. Not only is it's title *Best* American Poetry, but the a quick glance at the contents shows these names: A.R. Ammons, Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Bly, Creeley, Rita Dove, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Paul Hoover, Andrew Hudgins, Donald Justice, Koch, McDowell, Merrill, Pinsky, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Snodgrass, Gary Snyder and Richard Wilbur. It's an impressive line up of names. But this collection was a let down. Sure, there were some really good poems (such as the one by Elizabeth Bishop), and there were a lot of ok poems or other poems worth noting, but it isn't worthy of being called the best of any given year.

I have loved poetry ever since childhood; my first favorite poem started, "Once there was an elephant who tried to use the telephant." As I've matured, so has my taste in poetry. Rather than ranting against this poetry as I've done on another review I've decided to accept that this poetry is cutting edge and a little over my head right now. A book of The Best American Poetry should seek out poems that are the highest state of the art and not put out a book of the best liked poems. So, -feeling some envy of those who can enjoy such poems, I will spend my time, as I have for years, on those poets in between the Best and the Worst.

don't buy this. I'm sure these poets are very good at what they do, but I derive no pleasure from this volume. I usually dust this book off when unsuspecting undergraduates gripe about Yeats or B.H. Fairchild. After I dropped "State of the Union" on them, they were much more appreciative of my syllabus content.

There's difficult poetry, and then there's unreadable poetry--most of this book is the latter.

With a few exceptions (about five of the seventy-five poems), the poems in the anthology revel in extreme post-structuralist, avant-garde, or Language poetry obfuscation, resting largely on the philosophy that language conveys no meaning, so therefore any attempt by a writer to impart something other than meaninglessness to the reader is futile.

Obviously, one can debate such a philosophy, but I don't have the space for it here. However, there's nothing novel about such an approach to poetry; it's been done for over thirty years.

For a more scholarly assessment of such poetry, I recommend Joan Houlihan's "Three Invitations to a Far Reading" on the Contemporary Poetry Review website.

With few exceptions these poems show the arrogance of poets who think conveying any sort of meaning is a cliche.
Read Ted Kooser's Delights and Shadows for an anitdote. (Thank God we have a poet laureate from the Plains!)

I read the 2002 and 2003 editions, and though obviously I would not have purchased 2004 if my curiosity had not been sparked by some of the poems, they are some things that irk me about the series:

Do you really need to have two or more advanced degrees from Ivy League institutions and eight volumes of poetry to your name to be recognized for an American poem? Because, that's what the selections imply. I mean, it strikes me sometimes that poetry has become so obscure in its meanings that the only way to judge it is via the resume and distinction of the poet. So, once again, what you have in the 2004 BAP is a collection of the work of ivory tower intellectuals. Almost every selection is heavily informed by 'critical theory' tropes and studies of other avante-garde poets.

That said, I love difficult poetry, and a lot of the poems this year are absolutely mesmerizing. Also, in year's past, the poems have not necessarily fit together very well, and this year, I was able to read 5 or 10 in a row without being made to cringe by a self-concious stinker or feel like I was cruising on a rumble strip of nonsense.

I guess the nation's tiny poetry audience is somewhat attracted by the cache of hyper-educated poets. I sense that many of poems are missing that hardcore grit that I look for, but all the same, this is very intelligent poetry and the process of seeing through some of it may be valuable to poets and readers.

Few of the poems in this collection struck fire in me, a smaller percentage than earlier volumes in the series.

For many years, I have been taking the Best American Poetry books down from the shelf at the local bookstore for a peek, but I never felt compelled to buy one until I read the 2002 version selected by Robert Creeley. I've always had more respect than affection for Creeley, finding it hard to get into his stuff, but I loved the synergy (Marketing stole this word from the Greeks--I'm stealing it back) produced by the juxtaposition of devil-may-care experimentation with the best of more traditional, "mainstream" offerings in this volume. My favorite examples of these divergent impulses here are Jenny Boully's "The Body," a poem in the form of footnotes to blank pages (this poem has been ridiculed in other reviews found here, but I find it daring and exhilirating--in fact, I wish I had thought of it first) and Donald Hall's "Affirmation," an astonishingly straightforward and devastating poem that is one of my favorites from his body of work and one that should warm (freeze?) the heart of the most esthetically conservative reader.

Even though I received a B.A. in English with a focus on creative writing ten years ago, I have only recently begun to understand the struggle between those who would keep poetry at a place it never was (the "School of Quietude" in Ron Silliman's terms--you MUST read his blog, it's good whether you agree or not, just as long as you care about poetry) and those who want poetry to continue to evolve (not "improve"), no matter what unexpected and scary turns it may take (what Mr Silliman calls, in our time, the "post-avant"). This book seems to have frightened most of the reviewers who felt compelled to contribute their opinions here, which frightened state they express as distaste. Just know that the most innovative and forward poetry that has lasted was seen in its time as "eccentric" or "inaccessible" or "repugnant" or "unreadable" or "incomprehensible," ad nauseam, from Euripides to T.S. Eliot, who, despite of his conversion to stultifying artistic conservatism and his weird adoption by "the Establishment" (and weirder disinheritance by "the anti-Establishment"), told us, if I remember correctly, that meaning should not be sought when first reading poetry that is new to us, but rather an understanding of the qualities of language the poet is presenting to us.

[This may be a complete misrepresentation of Eliot; I'm sorry I don't remember where I read his statement about reading for meaning. Anyway, people who hate this book will respond that there is no quality to the language here, the good old days were the best, blah blah blah etc etc, but this is as good a place as any to end this review.]

Maybe too many aspiring poets hold inclusion in "The Best American Poetry" as being the pinnacle of having "arrived." This reasoning makes for a lot of frustrated poets, who feel as if their work is more deserving, which in turn makes for negative reviews. There are a lot of talented writers in this volume, writers whose work might have been overlooked or lost on readers, because so many poets don't turn to literary journals--they turn to this anthology to see who's who. I'm sure that younger poets (and very talented poets) such as Sarah Manguso and Jenny Boully benefited from this anthology because their work suddenly found hundreds of new readers. Of course, there is also bad, very bad poetry in this collection. However, I'm willing to take the good with the bad if it means having a yearly summary of the current poetry scene.

I have never been a fan of Creeley's work ("For Love" is honestly one of the worst poetry books I ever wasted a yard sale dollar on), but I still expected better from his BAP selections, which are totally lacking in flavor. Creeley tries to convert readers to his surrealist style, rife with inaccessible, abstract dream-language, most of which here is narcissistic, utterly incoherent, and reads like the journal ramblings of a Goth teenager. Someone who does not like poetry would not change his/her mind after reading BAP 2002, and that is exactly why I find this collection repugnant. As a poet myself, I have an open mind, experiment with nontraditional modes of writing, and enjoy the surrealist and renegade edge of many contemporary writers. But this edition was useless, both as enjoyable reading and as writing inspiration. 90% of the poems are meaningless, flat, and unfulfilling. Additionally, they were culled almost exclusively from the internet and unheard-of publications. I strongly support small presses and am always eager to sample new publications, but to ignore more established journals which consistently produce quality work feels disrespectful somehow. To be fair, there are a few bright spots in this edition--the poems by Broughton, Burkard, Chapman, Cooley, di Prima, Equi, Friedlander, Gizzi, Goldbarth, Hall, Kumin, Merwin, Myles, Metres, Olds, Sadoff, Warsh, Wier and Wright are worth a second read. But an anthology such as this shouldn't be assessed on the quality of each individual poem, rather on the tone and texture of the whole. The "picture" that BAP 2002 paints is a painful, wasteful, headache-inducing one. Creeley himself says in the introduction, "These poems are better than the best, each and every one of them. If you don't agree, then go find your own." Please, please take his advice.

Reader take note: if you are curious about contemporary poetry and are looking for an interesting place to start, this anthology is not for you. Try 2001 or 2003. Skip 2002. One of the interesting things about this series is discovering the guest editor, always a notable contemporary poet, as reader of contemporary poetry. What exactly was Robert Creeley thinking? Most of the poems in this volume are emminently forgettable; others unreadable. I enjoy reading this anthology every year, but in this case it was a real struggle.

It seems like cultural and gender identities are becoming more important than literature itself when it comes to literary criticism. I am very concerned about people who sees this anthology as a victory of the feminists and the multiculturalists over the so called 'predominantly white male society'. A good literature should appeal to some universal experiences that we in some way understand as human beings. This is why Homer and Li-Po(or Rihaku) appeals to us even to this day, despite the fact that they lived in a different cultural settings. As T. S. Eliot says, "Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality". A good writer knows that it is what is 'behind the experience that is significant, not the specific content of the experience. To the extent one understands this, they realize the significance of writing 'impersonal poetry' that appeals to all kinds of people in any period of time, so long as they have the intelligence to understand this. It is disappointing to see that even this prestigious anthology would fall into the victim of feminism and multiculturalism, because it is one of the few anthologies out there that offers some genuine poetry.

I read all of the Best of ... Poetry until about 2000 when I found the quality had really deteriorated. The series was uneven at best, but the 1996 edition was full of wonderful poetry. I might not find Adrienne Rich's politics or poetry particularly agreeable but her critical sense is impeccable.

It seems like cultural and gender identities are becoming more important than literature itself when it comes to literary criticism. I am very concerned about people who sees this anthology as a victory of the feminists and the multiculturalists over the so called 'predominantly white male society'. It is disappointing to see that even this prestigious anthology would fall into the victim of feminism and multiculturalism, because it is one of the few anthologies out there that offers some genuine poetry.

It seems like cultural and gender identities are becoming more important than literature itself when it comes to literary criticism. I am very concerned about people who sees this anthology as a victory of feminists and multiculturalists over the so called 'predominantly white male society'. A good literature should appeal to some universal experiences that we in some way understand as human beings. This is why Homer and Li-Po(or Rihaku) appeals to us even to this day, despite the fact that they lived in a different cultural settings. As T. S. Eliot says, "Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality". A good writer knows that it is what is 'behind the experience that is significant, not the specific content of the experience. To the extent one understands this, they realize the significance of writing 'impersonal poetry' that appeals to all kinds of people in any period of time, so long as they have the intelligence to understand this. It is disappointing to see that even this prestigious anthology would fall into the victim of feminism and multiculturalism, because it is one of the few anthologies out there that offers some genuine poetry.

Fundamentally, this is the dullest, least interesting collection of poetry I've ever seen. And it's deeply hypocritical of Rich as well; her own poetry reveals a woman who is aware not only of feminist and multicultural criticism, but who is also well-versed in the strengths and mysteries poetry can offer. ..................... There isn't a single piece worth reading in the entire book.

As with any anthology of poetry, the content largely depends on the editor. However, from the wonderful introduction Jorie Graham provided, I expected an equally wonderful collection in a call of arms for poets to help poets realize what they do is equally valid as anything else a writer may write, be it fiction or non-fiction. Unfortunately, I had trouble finding even one poem that was more that just okay. Perhaps it should just be called American poetry of 1990. I would recommend the 1999 edition of this series over the 1990 edition.