The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry

The self-proclaimed descendants of Lowell, Plath and Berryman (and, further back, Frost) meet yearly for a Vermont series of workshops and readings from which this anthology takes its name. Initially, one could say that its mostly confessionally based metric has simply devolved: the narcissism is still there, with most of these poems lingering over anxieties, ""deep sensibilities,"" distrust of the world, adultery, pleasant afternoons and vacations, etc. But the formal mastery of the Lowell generation--with its ties to Eliot's modernism, Auden's precosity, Williams's directness and his original prosody--are gone. While most of this work is not confessional in the strict sense, it is disheartening how few of the poems here rise above the basic frame of the exhausted, inescapable self in the world, or how, when a different theme is adopted, it is still tied to basic formal tricks--the piling up of redundant detail as a baroque display of knowledge is one of them--which renders the work repetitive and mundane. One hundred poets were invited to select from their own work; eighty-two came forward, including: Marvin Bell, Stephen Berg, Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, editors Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Tess Gallagher, Louise Gl ck, Linda Gregerson, Marilyn Hacker, Michael S. Harper, Brenda Hillman, Mark Jarman, Galway Kinnell, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, the late William Matthews, W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Alberto Rios, David St. John, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, James Tate, C.K. Williams and C.D. Wright. These are big names, and they deliver some virtuoso performances. (Many are also found the Best American, reviewed above.) But while there is some incontestably brilliant work here--Gl ck, Gregerson, Strand, Matthews and Komunyaaka stand out--the book reflects less of a ""commitment to the future of the nation's poetry,"" as the editors profess, than a veneration for its glorious past. (Sept.)