The Best American Poetry

""True poetry has always striven for, and has in the last twenty years come to perfect, a nobility of expression that is of vital importance for our democratic esthetic, moral, and political culture."" So writes John Hollander in the notably cheerful introduction to his selection of The Best American Poetry 1998. Highlights of the nobly constructed anthology include an excerpt from John Bricuth's forthcoming Just Let Me Say This About That, Thylias Moss's ""The Right Empowerment of Light,"" John Koethe's ""The Secret Amplitude"" and Jacqueline Osherow's ""La Leggenda della Vera Croce."" As always in this David Lehman edited series, each poet contributes a short note on his or her anthologized poem. (Scribner, $14 352p ISBN 0-684-81450-1; $30 cloth 81453-6; Aug.) For a glimpse of the former state of the art, look no further than this fall's Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Eric L. Haralson (with Hollander as an advisory editor), the 115 entries in this biographical encyclopedia cover every poet included by Hollander in The Library of America's acclaimed American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Contributors to the encyclopedia include Angus Fletcher (on James Russell Lowell), Daniel Hoffman (on Poe and Stephen Crane) and Barbara Packer (on Joseph Rodman Drake). (Fitzroy Dearborn, $95 536p ISBN 1-57958-008-4; Sept.)