The Best American Poetry 2001
by Robert Hass
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert HassEditor: David Lehman
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-08-21
ISBN: 0743203844
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of The Best American Poetry 2001
Book Review: Poet's Personal Stories and Pleasures
Summary: 5 Stars
"We're bent in the garden planting spring bulbs, pulling up
weeds, and I'm wondering how much longer we'll crouch here
on our knees in the damp soil sorting things out. Guardians
of shrubs and flowers, the first wild cyclamen sipping the sun.
We watch over each other as we watch over our garden,
woolly branches of cacti, fiery pokers of aloes in winter.
Especially during a long drought, after a snowfall, or following
the arcs of missiles on our screen. Flurries of extra caring.
Some mornings we hang on to each other as if we're afraid to let go."
~ pg. 126, Shirley Kaufman
The fascination I currently have with The Best American Poetry series seems born of my curiosity to see how each editor creates a world of poetry they feel possessed to love. The choices made by Robert Hass reflect so accurately his loves and dislikes. You can live in a short moment of his life through reflecting on what it is he enjoys about the selections in this book.
Each poet sees the world so uniquely, but many times they seem to write from a place of loneliness, the desire to speak to another soul of similar substance. This becomes very apparent in the personal stories of pleasure and pain, emotional and real, fresh and trying. At times lines from a poem feel distant and sad while others spring from the page, pouncing on you with the joy of a happy kitten. Poetry has its own rewards and good poetry is the reward for searching through a lot of moments, that while not mediocre to many, may be to you. Your personal taste figures in highly in what you will enjoy and to one person, a poem may mean nothing, and to another, it is the world.
For this reason, I try to view poems from many perspectives. I will say that the poems in this particular volume can be especially perplexing. The truth is, you may read this book one day and feel completely disconnected and come back and read it on another day and wonder what you were thinking.
The mood of this volume is especially intellectual and complex with many literary references, like discussions of the death of Virgina Woolf and the writings of Dostoevsky. The poems are mysteries to be solved and require your full attention and don't seem to immediately welcome you into their intimacy. But then you happen upon a poem like Linda Gregg's "The Singers Change, The Music Goes On" and you know you have happened upon a moment of truth that will endure.
"We live our myth in the recurrence,
pretending we will return another day.
Like the morning coming every morning.
The truth is we come back as a choir."
Allen Grossman's "Enough rain for Agnes Walquist" has some very intriguing thoughts:
" -a smooth stone
passed in a kiss from the mouth
of a Fate into my open mouth
amidst odors of metal
and slamming doors
at the dark end of a railway car
as the train was leaning
on a curve and slowing
to stop-is lost. Lost"
Alice Noteley's poem must be printed sideways because the lines are so long it can't possibly fit on the pages any other way:
"always near the border and never in the snows come again and the purple sinister sky
so I can die and read the books they leave me always alive the letters and the letters letters."
Robert Pinsky's "Jersey Rain has beautiful images of the moon where he talks about "The chilly liquefaction of day to night." James Richardson writes "Ten-second Essays" that are numbered and give you snippets of moments to enjoy and expand upon in your own mind. A few of the lines are quite funny, like: "Say nothing as if it were news" or witty like: "The road not taken is the part of you not taking the road."
Mary Ruefle's "Furtherness" is especially beautiful in the most poignant of ways as she writes about death. The poem I loved the most was "Apple" by Susan Stewart which made me long for the Apple tree in my grandmother's yard.
"You can roast late apples
in the ashes. You can run
them in slices on a stick.
you can turn the stem to
find the letter of your love."
Most poets will find Bernard Welt's "I stopped writing poetry" rather amusing. I loved his line: "It's a terrible thing to receive exactly the attention you want." The entire poem gives insight into why poets write in the first place and any poet could relate to: "still a breeze reaches me from time to time fragrant of verse."
If you read this book and stopped at page 58, you would miss an entire world! I was so happy I kept reading.
~The Rebecca Review
Summary of The Best American Poetry 2001
The annual publication of "The Best American Poetry" is an eagerly awaited event among poetry fans across the country. This year's volume in the critically acclaimed series presents American poetry in all its dazzling variety at a moment of extraordinary richness and originality.Guest editor Robert Hass, a former Poet Laureate and a central figure in the poetry world, brings his passionate intelligence to "The Best American Poetry 2001." In his engaging introduction, Hass writes that after sifting through dozens of literary magazines, he "found that there were large numbers of poems that gave me pleasure, seemed to have inventive force, or intellectual passion or surprise." The works he selected are diverse in every way and have only their excellence in common. Ranging from the traditional to the innovative, the book features important new poems from Anne Carson, Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, Robert Pinsky, and Adrienne Rich; rare posthumous works by Elizabeth Bishop and James Schuyler; and poems by marvelous newcomers like Amy England, Olena Kalytiak Davis, and Rachel Zucker.
With comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's always entertaining foreword assessing the current state of the art, "The Best American Poetry 2001" is a book every reader of poetry will want to have.
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