100 great poems of the twentieth century

Favorite-poem anthologies have become quite popular and are intriguing both for their content and for what can be gleaned about their creators, from Robert Pinksy to Harold Bloom to Camille Paglia. As Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Strand observes in his scintillating, discerning, and classy anthology of great twentieth-century poems, every book of this nature is a personal one, and no two editors would chose the same 100 best poems. Strand is drawn to poems that match eloquence and restraint with gorgeously sensual description, music in minor keys, self-conscious drama, haunting emotion, wry humor, and hard-won wisdom. Strand has selected works by poets of Europe and North and South America, and because there are so many gifted American poets, he restricted himself to those born before 1927. The result is a marvelously graceful, shimmering cosmos of poems by the likes of Anna Akhmatova, A. R. Ammons, Amy Clampit, Robert Desnos, Robert Frost, Nazim Hikmet, Kenneth Koch, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gabriela Mistral, Eugenio Montale, Octavio Paz, and Derek Walcott. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2005 Booklist

Any poetry anthology can be an argument waiting to happen, but Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Strand (Blizzard of One) preempts criticism by acknowledging up front the subjectivity of his choices, his biases and benchmarks. (About half of these "100 great poems" come from Americans, though none are by U.S. poets born after 1927.) Strand admits that the absence of poems from Asia and Africa reflects a personal lack of knowledge, which may not appease literary census-takers. Yet he includes an intriguing mix of the expected (Eliot's "Prufrock," Thomas's "Fern Hill," Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," Auden's elegy for Yeats), the pleasantly surprising (Fernando Pessoa's "The Tobacco Shop," Ruth Stone's "That Winter," Wislawa Szymborska's "The End and the Beginning"), and the simply puzzling (Rafael Alberti's ode to Buster Keaton, Ezra Pound's "Canto XLV"). Though Strand's selections vary in tone and length, most poems tend toward imagistic, lyrical meditation, sometimes referencing the wars, gulags, and genocidal terrors that characterize the century's history. Idiosyncrasy is both this collection's liability and its strength, so readers can expect a provocative if not uniformly satisfying experience. For larger poetry collections.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.