By now readers are able to peruse these volumes with the sort of familiar affection given to the beloved family nuisance. This year, series editor David Lehman's temperature-taking preface reminds us of Ruth Lilly's colossal $100 million bequest to Poetry Magazine, and notes that you can now collect poet cards and purchase poet swimsuit calendars. The contributors' notes at the back of the book eat up more available pages than usual as they recount what particular works of art or jazz tracks made the authors write their "best" poems, while a modest voice indicates that this marks their 8th or 10th appearance in the series. Guest editor Komunyakaa (Neon Vernacular, 1994) argues that the avant-garde, which he terms the "exploratory" movement, exists as "a poetry that borders on cultivated solecism and begs theorists to decipher it" and that it is "death in language"; by contrast, the poetry he has chosen "has content." Finally, the poems themselves appear; here are fresh gems from Richard Howard, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell (a spectacular threnody on the fall of New York's World Trade Center towers), Carolyn Kizer, Rita Dove, Richard Wilbur, James Tate, Louise Glück, Philip Levine, C.K. Williams, and the three most recent Pulitzer Prize winners, Stephen Dunn, Carl Dennis and Paul Muldoon. Two other poets stand out—Amy Gerstler contributes an amusing Gilda Radner–like piece about misreading a mailer that wants to send her "Beethoven's Greatest Symphonies," while Ruth Stone (b. 1915) gives the proceedings a suitably youthful air with her speculative "Lines": "Voice, perhaps you are the universe;/ the hum of spiders." Nowhere near as lively as last year's Robert Creeley–edited compilation, the 16th edition of this annual has pleasures of its own. (Oct.)
