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The Best American Poetry 2008 (1990)

by Charles Wright(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0743299744 (ISBN13: 9780743299749)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Scribner

review 1: Every year, this book seems to closely reflect the guest editor's own aesthetic, and when I first picked up this year's volume, I noticed that a lot of the poems have long lines like Charles Wright's. The collection is a bit more broad than that, though. Although there isn't as high a concentration of "experimental" poems as when Heather McHugh or Lyn Heijinian edited, Brenda Hillman, Michael Palmer, and Jorie Graham coexist, here, with Maxine Kumin, Tony Hoagland, and Richard Howard. The collection as a whole is only okay, though some individual poems "wow-ed" me: Moira Egan's bawdy take-off on Millay in "Millay Goes Down"; Frank Bidart's powerful villanelle, "If See No End In Is"; Joshua Beckman's untitled poem; Mark Jarman's "Snoring"; and Natasha Trethewey's "On Ca... moreptivity." David Lehman's foreword, which describes Auden's "daydream College for Bards," is also thought-provoking.
review 2: What a nice, refreshing breath of air. Gust of storm wind. Lush ocean breeze, heavy with secrets.Charles Wright picks out poems with stories at their heart, poems that play with language and form and poems that respond to the classics from where we sit in the modern world. My favorite pieces (so far) are:"Evening Song" ~ Tom Andrews"Men" ~ Lydia Davis"Rock Polisher" ~ Chris Forhan"Divide and Conquer" ~ Alan Sullivan"Sepsis" ~ C. Dale Young less

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