The Best American Poetry 1996 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 068481451X ISBN 13: 9780684814513

Publisher: Scribner, 1996

Synopsis

Now in its ninth year, The Best American Poetry is universally acclaimed as the best anthology in the field. The compilation includes a diverse abundance of poems published in 1995 in more than 40 publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Bamboo Ridge.

About this title

About the Author

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, is also the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His eleven books of poetry include Playlist, Poems in the Manner Of, New and Selected Poems, When a Woman Loves a Man, and  The Daily Mirror. The most recent of his many nonfiction books is One Hundred Autobiographies  A Memoir. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Reviews

Rich has amassed a far-flung group to represent her view of America. These poets were born in Jamaica, China, Mexico, South Africa, Canada, Hawaii and the mainland. There are professors and prisoners, a medical student and a jazz critic. Rich embraces both the bilingual and the long poem, but what is truly startling is how little these poets say of joy and how much of suffering. It is a heavy read. Alicia Ostriker writes of the Holocaust, Wang Ping of the deaths of Chinese stowaways, Gary Soto of the destitute. There are three poets born after 1975, testing human experience and response: Deborah Stein, Quentin Rowan and Natasha Le Bel ("my born body new and/ gravid with musical sensuality"). And four poets who passed away last year haunt the anthology with meditations on death: William Dickey, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill and Jean Starr ("I have felt each living link begin to wither"). David Lehman is the series editor.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As those familiar with Rich's politics and persuasions would expect, her personal selection of outstanding poems published in 1995 offers the widest multicultural gathering of voices?from Wanda Coleman to Martin Espada to Stanley Kunitz?yet represented in this annual series. It's an anthology of aching, straightforward narratives that explore the effects of victimization and injustice on the American psyche. Since much of this work springs from the need to witness and attest, experimental poetics take a back seat to direct, dignified expression, and the tone is more often one of anger and resignation ("We have done away with all noise, but the agony of respiration"?David Shapiro) than of reverie. Rich does not exclude the famous (Atwood, Merrill, Merwin) in her quest for diversity, but as this series proves time and again, some of the most interesting poetry comes from the yet-to-be-known. Poets to watch for in the years to come: Wang Ping, C.S. Giscombe, and Beth Ann Fennelly. For all collections.?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068481451X
• ISBN 13: 9780684814513
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Lehman David