Former U.S. Poet Laureate Hass (Sun Under Wood) offers some pleasures but few real surprises in this solid 14th installment of the ever-popular annual series. As always, a famous guest editor (Hass), series editor David Lehman (The Daily Mirror,
etc.), and their assistants cull 75 poems by American writers from the previous year's run of journals: Lehman and Hass each add a short foreword, and the poets themselves send in "notes and comments," with which the volume concludes. Plenty of poets here are already famous—Elizabeth Bishop, who died in 1979, appears with a revealingly unburnished, posthumously published poem from the New Yorker; Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Robert Creeley, Anne Carson, Robert Bly, John Ashbery and the new American laureate, Billy Collins, also turn up. So do the influential and richly rewarding poets Rae Armantrout and Lyn Hejinian, whose appearance here would once have been a surprise. (Opinions will differ on whether Hass should have included Brenda Hillman, to whom he is married.) As those who know Hass's own work might expect, his selections from lesser-known creators (like James Richardson) tend toward the expansive and meditative, with room for brief prose poems and extended comedy. And the volume as a whole—as Hass's preface admits—skews slightly older, and farther towards stars, than some previous Best Americans
have (though not Rita Dove's entry from last year). The younger writers that are here—including Lee Ann Brown, Christopher Edgar, Thomas Sayers Ellis ("some readings you really could hear/ a rat piss on cotton"), Noelle Kocot and Dean Young—are energetic and accessible. Readers familiar with poetry according to Agni, APR, Fence
and Verse, leavened here with a smattering of the old school, may not find much to discover; for others, this book is an excellent guide to the changing of the po-biz guard. Either way, it will be one of the top-selling poetry titles this year. (Sept.)
