The Best American Poetry 1991
Keen, Suzanne
I HEAR AMERICA RHYMING THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1991 Mark Strand, Editor Collier Books, $12.95, 326 pp. Suzanne Keen he Best American Poetry has become one of autumn's events. Since a...
...The white man cradles his tar baby...
...He fathered it, it looks just like him, the spitting image...
...Joyce Carol Oates's "Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942" imagines the situation and thoughts of the woman at the counter, while the preceding poem, Thylias Moss's "Lunchcounter Freedom," wrenches another American scene out of its place in documentary and reinvests it with an individual consciousness: "Because I'm nonviolent I don't act or react...
...Robert Kelly's "A Flower for the New Year" contains this blunt reminder of suffering: "...and I sit here baffled by the name of purple flowers, remembering all the girls in my life as they step naked-footed lewdly up the chill sedate corridors of the marble museum of my heart, I worship their nakedness while some man lies in the snow on Sixth Avenue with no shoes...
...It provides diverse perspectives and interesting congruences, such as the appearance of the figure, in several very different poems, of a homeless person, as in Allen Grossman's "The Ether Dome (An Entertainment)": "...It is Autumn/ In America...
...and be in possession of his loss instead of being possessed by it...
...The Best American Poetry 1991 gives its readers an admirable map of what we are going through...
...Since a different poet guest-edits each annual volume, the series provides both familiar pleasures and a refreshingly individual look at "the best" of an abundant harvest...
...The forms and kinds of poetry in the volume impress not merely by their variety but by their vitality...
...The menu offers tuna fish, grits, beef in a sauce like desire...
...The fourteen poems written in three-line stanzas surprisingly outnumber poems in quatrains...
...When knocked from the stool my body takes its shape from what it falls into...
...And there is a body / On the path in the Public Garden...
...Among stanzashapes used by the poets, triplets abound...
...That its publishers can claim best-seller status for the series (it makes the lists compiled from independent bookstores) suggests that Americans do read poetry, especially when it is intelligently selected and attractively packaged...
...I approach your metal mouth, you put it close to me...
...The asterisk marks the special...
...His mother, he reports, "was not a reader of poetry...
...Admittedly, very long poems present anthologists with an insoluble difficulty...
...Although Strand celebrates language's ability to enchant and admires poetry's evasion of final, certain meanings, he insists on its function in our lives: "The way poetry has 28: 27 March 1992 Commonweal of setting our internal houses in order, of formalizing emotion difficult to articulate, is one of the reasons we still depend on it in moments of crisis and during those times when it is important that we know in so many words what we are going through...
...The list of addresses of the journals from which the poems come reminds readers that poetry publishers, as well as poets, exist all over America and that you don't need to live near a big city bookstore to get your hands on their magazines...
...To have all the parts of David Shapiro's "The Seasons," for instance, allows the reader fully to enjoy the villanelle, "Drawing after Summer," that closes the sequence by recycling lines from the preceding poems into a chilling envoi: "The moon moves outward failing to grip the roadway...
...After her death, his father begins to see what poetry is for: "He can read my poems...
...Each magus in turn...
...Shapiro's comment on his sequence Commonweal 27 March 1992: 29 icized for its omissions, but this volume so elaborately directs our attention to "all the rest" that I can scarcely fault it...
...Mark Strand earns my gratitude for printing sequences and long poems in their entirety...
...The terrain explored by poems in this volume includes the harrowing scenes of Carolyn Forche's "The Recording Angel," Alice Fulton's imaginative "The Fractal Lanes," and David Trinidad's amusing set of seventeen haiku based on old TV shows, "Reruns...
...The extraordinary subtlety and flexibility of Derek Walcott's tercets stand out, although the excerpt from Omeros only gives us a hint of their cumulative effect in the book-length poem...
...I saw the ruins of poetry, of a poetry...
...q 30: 27 March 1992 Commonweal...
...Mark Strand introduces the 1991 volume with a poignant essay about his parents, who did not really understand his vocation...
...I see you stuck in the ground like a dictionary...
...David Lehman, the general editor of the series, finds "every reason to rejoice in the diversity that seems inevitably to emerge" from the process of seeking seventy-five poems out of the thousands published in periodicals in a year...
...The very long line is represented not only by Ashbery's "Of Dreams and Dreaming," but by Gerald Burns's "Double Sonnet for Mickey," which delivers two scoops of rhymes in the Elizabethan pattern at the end of lines so long they defy the ear's expectation of fulfillment...
...Previous volumes, edited by John Ashbery (I988), Donald Hall (I989), and Jorie Graham (I990), have given readers a look at about seventy-five poems, gleaned from the year's journals...
...He is free to choose from available choices...
...they must either excerpt or omit...
...He can't let go of his future...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 6
