The Best of the Best American Poetry

This 25th-Anniversary anthology celebrating Scribner’s annual Best American Poetry series, each volume of which is compiled by a different notable poet, with the help of series founder and editor David Lehman, offers one kind of survey of the past quarter-century of American verse and begs the question of what it means for a poem to be among the “best.” Although, necessarily, this is not a panoramic representation of all that U.S. poets have to offer, it does feature poets as aesthetically disparate as the formalist James Merrill (with a poem from 1991) and the free-form experimenter Lyn Hejinian, whose inclusion dates from 1994. There are plenty of poems by usual suspects—John Ashbery, Robert Hass, James Tate—as well as a few by late legends, like Allen Ginsberg, Jane Kenyon, Kenneth Koch, Adrienne Rich, and James Schuyler—but the book is short on names that will be new to poetry readers, leaving poets like Major Jackson, Sarah Manguso, and C. Dale Young, all now in mid-career, to carry the torches for new poetry. Readers will find, however, many of the standout poems from various volumes, including Anne Carson’s incredible “The Life of Towns” (from 1993) and Rae Armantrout’s slippery “Soft Money” (from 2011). Most of all, this volume attests to what may be the rule of this series: “the best” is a matter of each editor, and each reader’s tastes; no doubt, some readers will discover new favorites here. (Apr.)