Looking for Your Name: A Collection of Contemporary Poems

In an anthology of contemporary poetry, eighty-six poets explore issues ranging from pacifism to matrimonial trouble, the massacre at Tiananmen Square to styrofoam, unemployment to El Salvador

An exceptional 112 American poems on serious themes, written by nearly 90 different poets and assembled by a lauded anthologist and poet (Brickyard Summer, 1989). We're told that the collection began as ``an exploration of `conflict' ''; most of the poems contrast themes and images (beauty and horror, fragility and tenacity) or express mixed feelings (love and loss, nostalgia and regret, pity and anger). A few are frankly celebratory (``Ice Hockey'') or comic (``The Belt Buckle''). The volume is divided into two sections corresponding roughly to ``private'' and ``public'' experience: death, love (including lesbian and gay), athletics, and nature in the first; economic issues, violence, war (especially Vietnam), and family in the second. A garish, surreal jacket, incorporating disparate symbols, does little justice to the richness and complexity within. Fully indexed. (Poetry. 12+) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.