The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review - Hardcover

  • 3.86 out of 5 stars
    71 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780393048261: The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0393048268 ISBN 13: 9780393048261
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2000

Synopsis

Presenting an outstanding array of work by some of America's finest poets, an innovative anthology represents twentyfive years of selections of The American Poetry Review and encompasses the poems of Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, and other notable writers.

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Reviews

Whether you praise it or disdain it, there is no more visible venue for new poetry that the American Poetry Review (APR), which since 1972 has filled its homely tabloid pages with work by poets both belaureled and obscure. But you won't find many poems from the latter among the roughly 800 selected here. Almost every na e is familiar -- A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Lucile Clifton, W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic, Gerald Stern, and Derek Walcott -- and some -- John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, and Sylvia Plath -- are downright monumental. The result is a broad collective view of the American poet's concern between the waning of the Vietnam War and the rise of the dot-com day trader. It's fun to move from Jack Gilbert's skin-tight lyrics to Allen Ginsberg's baggy monologs in the space of a few pages or to compare the rhetorical similarities of Li-Young Lee and Denise Levertov via the accident of alphabetical adjacency. Harold Bloom's introduction, predictably contentious, faintly damns what follows for not being Whitmanic enough, but most readers aren't Bloom, and for some this anthology will serve as an amiable bedside companion for lovers of poetry everywhere. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
W W Norton & Co Inc
Publication date
2000
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0393048268
ISBN 13 
9780393048261
Binding
Hardcover
Edition number
1
Number of pages
820
Editor
Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Arthur Vogelsang
Rating
  • 3.86 out of 5 stars
    71 ratings by Goodreads