Detailed item info | Synopsis | Includes work by W.S. Merwin, James Merrill, and Margaret Atwood as well as Alberto Rios, Marilyn Chin, and Ray Young Bear, culled from over 40 diverse publications such as the "New Yorker," the "Paris Review," and "Bamboo Ridge."
| | Details | | Series: | The Best American Poetry | | Editor: | John Hollander |
| | Size | | Length: | 320 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in. | | Width: | 5.8 in. | | Thickness: | 1.0 in. | | Weight: | 13.6 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | The 1998 edition of the "year's worth of the very best" ("People") in poetry features stunning poems from such esteemed writers as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, Robert Pinsky, and Rosanna Warren. Local reading with the contributors.
| | Industry reviews | "True poetry has always striven for, and has in the last twenty years come to perfect, a nobility of expression that is of vital importance for our democratic esthetic, moral, and political culture." So writes John Hollander in the notably cheerful introduction to his selection of The Best American Poetry 1998. Highlights of the nobly constructed anthology include an excerpt from John Bricuth's forthcoming Just Let Me Say This About That, Thylias Moss's "The Right Empowerment of Light," John Koethe's "The Secret Amplitude" and Jacqueline Osherow's "La Leggenda della Vera Croce." As always in this David Lehman edited series, each poet contributes a short note on his or her anthologized poem. (Scribner, $14 352p ISBN 0-684-81450-1; $30 cloth 81453-6; Aug.)For a glimpse of the former state of the art, look no further than this fall's Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Eric L. Haralson (with Hollander as an advisory editor), the 115 entries in this biographical encyclopedia cover every poet included by Hollander in The Library of America's acclaimed American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Contributors to the encyclopedia include Angus Fletcher (on James Russell Lowell), Daniel Hoffman (on Poe and Stephen Crane) and Barbara Packer (on Joseph Rodman Drake). (Fitzroy Dearborn, $95 536p ISBN 1-57958-008-4; Sept.)
Bukey
Apollonian virtues elegance, measure, constancy abound in Hollander's 75 selections from last year's magazine verse. Like Harold Bloom, editor of The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997 (LJ 4/1/98), Hollander also eschews, if more politely, the alleged excesses of postmodernism, and his exhibits offer evidence that the old prosodic practices of rhyme, pentameter, sonnet, and sestina are very much alive in the hands of both new (Craig Arnold) and familiar (Hecht, Walcott, Justice) practitioners. But while the technical skills displayed in individual pieces may inspire admiration, the collective tenor of this volume seems overly sedate, solemn, and, well, fussy. Long, static meditations alternate with shorter, scenic ones, and the sparing humor is usually of a droll sort. True, no single volume in this often exciting annual series has quite represented the full stylistic spectrum of American poetry, but Hollander's choice implies a partisanship as narrow (if oppositely so) as Adrienne Rich's controversial 1996 selection. Still, for readers who feel besieged by inscrutable poetic experiments, this installment will be a zephyr from Parnassus. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Kakutani
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