The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry

A number of editorial decisions prevent this collection from living up to its name. McClatchy, editor of The Yale Review, has decided to exclude ""the extraordinary body of contemporary poetry in English,"" i.e., the work of poets from Britain, Ireland, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealandon the grounds that this work is ""more readily available."" The collection does embrace, however, poems written in English by such poets as Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka, for whom the language is, as McClatchy notes, a ""colonial bequest."" While this decision may make sense for the U.K. and the U.S., it's hard to think of a New Zealand poet whose work is as readily available as, say, Pablo Neruda's, whose work is admitted. But whatever the book may lack in editorial vision, it does provide a respectable sampling of some of the best-known poets of our day, e.g., Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, as well as a large number of poets whose work is less familiar, from Denmark's Henrik Nordbrandt to Japan's Ryuichi Tamura. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the collection is the number of poets here whose dissident beliefs and writings have led to imprisonment or exile. Among them are Dennis Brutus in South Africa and Nguyen Chi Thien in Vietnam. They serve as a potent reminder that in some parts of the world poetry and principle remain matters of life and death. (July)