Sets the bar for 'Best American Poetry'

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	• The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry J.D. Mcclatchy Vintage, 2003 - 656 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A flawed but satisfying anthology

A required textbook for a poetry class, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry is a flawed but satisfying anthology that is a great pick up for new readers and students to the world of poetry. Seventy-five poets are featured in the anthology, including mainstays and well-knowns like Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Mark Doty, and Yusef Komunyakaa among others. Editor J.D. McClatchy provides a short biography of each poet to go along with a handful of poems (usually six or seven) that differ in the length of a quarter page to several. This format is the ultimate flaw of the anthology, along with a few glaring omissions (no Frost or Hughes? then again, this has the words "Vintage" and "Contemporary" in the same title, which is as much an oxymoron as I can think of) thanks to McClatchy, but despite all that, the anthology ends up working well for what it's meant to do. All in all, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry is best suited for newbies or students (as these poems have been featured in previous, and better, volumes and anthologies), and the cheaper list price doesn't hurt either.

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Sets the bar for 'Best American Poetry'

If you've ever been disappointed by the inconsistent quality of poems found in the "Best American Poetry" series published by Scribner (with series editor David Lehman), this anthology will show you why. Not every poem will give you chills or connect with your soul, but not a single one is bad or banal.

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A Great Anthology

This is a great anthology of later 20th C. American poets and a great book to use for a poetry reading group, because the selection for each poet is sufficiently long to provide a good introduction. It inspired me to acquire books by many of the individual poets.

I would prefer that the poems be dated and would greatly prefer it to be available hardbound - it deserves the permanence in my library.

McClatchy's editing of this and Contemporary World Poetry is outstanding!

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Useful despite its flaws

This book is decidedly an anthology of poets rather than poems: everyone gets at least three pages and a half-page introduction. It's also fairly encyclopedic and catholic. The main use of an anthology of this type is to give the interested reader a quick idea of what, say, Merwin or Ashbery or Clampitt is all about. This task it discharges quite well.

Now for the flaws. There are some idiosyncratic omissions, which hurt the book; regardless of what McClatchy thinks of Robert Bly, he should have included a few of his poems and let the reader judge for himself. Similarly with Stanley Kunitz. I assume McClatchy likes Thom Gunn and left him out for being British, which is a little silly because he spent most of his life in California. These omissions make the book a little less complete as a reference.

More seriously, the anthology is a hard slog because so many of the poems are at least a couple of pages long. This means you can't dip in at random and read a poem and be surprised -- which is what anthologies are traditionally for. It would be a more readable book if there were fewer interminable blank verse meditations, many of them unengaging and not very characteristic -- e.g. one would not realize from the selections that Merrill and Hecht were masters of poetic form. That said, one does get some idea of each voice if one persists.

A persistent pattern in this period is the mid-career switch from highly formal verse to a distinctive personal style. (Lowell, Berryman, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Plath...) It's fascinating to see the mature style next to the earlier style; the book does this sometimes, but not with Merwin.

On the whole this anthology is a slightly unhappy medium. It would have served its purpose better if it had been more conventional; on the other hand I'd have really liked to see an unabashedly personal anthology that more vividly reflected McClatchy's own tastes. Still, what we have is a useful introduction to a very rich period.

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A Launch Pad For Poetry Lovers

I bought a copy of the first edition of this book (much prettier cover I am sorry to say) in high school. I thumbed through it, over and over, finding new and different poems to savor, getting exposed to countless amazing poets whose full books now grace my shelves (Anthony Hecht, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Mona Van Duyn, Howard Nemerov). This book, by choosing generally shorter poems that catch your eye (with some exceptions) by a host of excellent modern poets with tremendous variations in styles, changed me from a poetry dabbler to a true poetry consumer and fan. I often give away copies of this book, with post-its marking my favorites. I highly, highly recommend this book, particularly to people intimidated by the number of diverse and excellent poets from which to choose.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Dazzling in its range, exhilarating in its immediacy and grace, this collection gathers together, from every region of the country and from the past forty years, the poems that continue to shape our imaginations. From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Gluck, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry's daring energies and its tender understandings.

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