Though mostly when I think of myselfAside from sounding an unexpected rhyme, this "navigable sorrow" betrays Hass as a poet of sensibility. What elevates him from preciousness is a powerful need to engage and indulge--to "navigate"--memories of his alcoholic mother and his own painful divorce. Sun Under Wood, in other words, is the book Robert Lowell would have written had he grown up in California. The raccoon Hass confronts in "Iowa City: Early April" seems to have stepped right out of Lowell's "Skunk Hour," but instead of moaning, "I myself am hell ... nobody's here," Hass muses, "That his experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were things entirely apart, / ...And as for my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I'm not sure it's any one thing...." Such universal emotions are hard to find words for, but throughout Sun Under WoodHass speaks with a clear, disturbing, and urgent voice. --Edward Skoog]]>
at that age, I am standing at my older brother's closet
studying the shirts,
convinced that I could be absolutely transformed
by something I could borrow.
And the days churned by,
navigable sorrow.
Guest editor Robert Hass, a former Poet Laureate and a central figure in the poetry world, brings his passionate intelligence to The Best American Poetry 2001. In his engaging introduction, Hass writes that after sifting through dozens of literary magazines, he "found that there were large numbers of poems that gave me pleasure, seemed to have inventive force, or intellectual passion or surprise." The works he selected are diverse in every way and have only their excellence in common. Ranging from the traditional to the innovative, the book features important new poems from Anne Carson, Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, Robert Pinsky, and Adrienne Rich; rare posthumous works by Elizabeth Bishop and James Schuyler; and poems by marvelous newcomers like Amy England, Olena Kalytiak Davis, and Rachel Zucker.
With comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's always entertaining foreword assessing the current state of the art, The Best American Poetry 2001 is a book every reader of poetry will want to have.
]]>"There is news in poems," argues Robert Haas. This collection gathers the full two years' worth of Hass's choices, including recently published poems as well as older classics. The selections reflect the events of the day, whether it be an elder poet recieving a major prize, a younger poet publishing a first book, the death of a great writer, or the changing seasons and holidays. They also reflect Hass's personal taste. Here is "one of the most gorgeous poems in the English language" ("To Autumn" by John Keats): a harrowing Holocaust poem ("Deathfugue" by Paul Celan); and "my favorite American poem of spring" ("Spring and All" by William Carlos Williams). With a brief introduction to each poet and poem, a note on the selection, and insights on how the poem works, Robert Hass acts as your personal guide to the poetry shelves at your local bookstores and to some of the best poetry of all time.
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