The Best of the Best American Poetry

by Robert Pinsky

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published April 1, 2013

About the author

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.
wikipedia

Reviews

[berkan berghahn · Rating 4 out of 5]

My relationship to poetry has been a rough one. It was not the most fun learning about the subject in school as the majority of my teacher did not do a good enough job to make it enticing enough for us students. One teacher made us write poems and writing my own one was fun - but as I was writing it, I exclusively took care to perfectly rhyme everything in a correct manner, I paid attention to stanzas and to the the endings, formulating masculine endings for the male lover and feminine endings for the female lover. Now, looking back and after reading this, I paid more attention to stylistic devices when writing my poem than actually writing the poem from my heart. I do understand that procedure is somewhat necessary for students to understand the theoretical aspect of writing something... but it detaches you from the emotional aspect of writing.
This collection was mandatory for my university class and it really left a good impression on me. Reading the poems out loud in class and talking about it in the plenary made me consider reading more poetry in the future - and of course teaching it differently to my students (hopefully).

[Gelynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved some poems and thought some unusual or odd. But great collection on the whole. Please not there is an appendix at that back for each author with their thoughts about each poem - I discovered after reading all the poems.