Best American Poetry 1993

by Louise Glück (Editor), David Lehman (Series Editor)

The most recent addition to the series of contemporary American poetry includes the series debut of thirty poets and represents forty-six literary journals and magazines. Simultaneous. 25,000 first printing.

Genres: Poetry, American

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 1993

About the author

American poet Louise Elisabeth Glück served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004.

Parents of Hungarian Jewish heritage reared her on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University.

She was the author of twelve books of poetry, including: A Village Life (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.

In 2001, Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection, The Wild Iris . Glück is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award ( Triumph of Achilles ), the Academy of American Poet's Prize ( Firstborn ), as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

Glück also worked as a senior lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, served as a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and taught at Goddard College in Vermont. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teached as the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale University and in the creative writing program of Boston University.

Reviews

[Sara Kearns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louise Gluck guest-edited this anthology, which I think is one of the two best of the "Best American Poetry" series. Among the best work included: Carolyn Creedon's "Litany," Tim Dlugos's "Healing the World from Battery Park," Alice Fogel's "The Necessity," and Paul Hoover's "Theory."

[SmarterLilac · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is definitely not my favorite of the Best American Poetry series; Gluck is a great poet, not so great editor.

[Grace Usleman · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I didn’t love this collection, I was very enamored by the introduction as well as being able to see the differences between today’s styles of poetry and that of the early 90s.

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a poetry autodidact, I am doing a variety of things to learn the craft and service my inspiration. One of them is simply to read random good poetry. To that end I checked out this book from the library. What a treat! Not only was the poetry a great mix of styles, themes and authors but included in the back are brief poet bios where they can give a short explanation about what brought them to the particularly submitted poem. It is fun to read what they have to say and then read the poem. What I love is how often the source of inspiration is far removed from the finished work. I also love how some poets don't or won't explain themselves. What I love in poetry is this freedom and chaos. In the end, an act of inspiration hits the page and what I as a reader do with that or how I relate to that is completely my act of freedom as well.

There were probably twenty of these 'best of American poetry' volumes on the shelf and I selected this one because I adore Louise Gluck. Now I don't know how typical it was that such a volume would include poems by Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, Mark Strand and John Updike but what riches! Such variety and depth and also a strong sense of those times when sourness hadn't yet turned to desperation in the Zeitgeist.

The poem I thought most memorable among many is A.R. Ammons' Garbage. It is quite long but wonderfully self reflective that felt perfectly of those times of the 'Larry Sanders Show,' 'The Player,' Gore Vidal's 'Duluth' from the decade before. It takes nothing away from this poem to say that thirty years later the subject is unspeakably close to the sorrow of human life.
And yet to quote one of my key poetic crushes, Mary Oliver, the other side of human story continues on just like the poppies as the title of her poem.

'But I also say this; that light is an invitation to happiness and that happiness, when it's done right is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive, Inside the bright fields...'

[Marc Kohlman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A literary masterwork! One of my favorite 90's editions in the series. Truly a spectacular, engrossing and sensual emotional joy of a collection.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know where my aunt got this book but she gave to me once as a present. It's taken me a few years to re-read and re-read but the poems I liked initally are still the same ones I like now. Is there a recent edition?

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because Tony Hoagland recommended it as the best of the series. I don't know about that, but there's a lot of good stuff in here.