The Oxford book of American poetry

Big anthologies are time-honored, useful tools for the study of genres such as stories and poetry. But they are also ephemeral, as one decade's selection of "the best" gives way to the next decade's. This volume includes 210 poets and covers 350 years; about 150 pages are devoted to poets born since 1940, so many are in midcareer. Among the new inclusions are women poets: fine works by Julia Ward Howe, Josephine Jacobsen, and Lorine Niedecker are recovered. The contemporary poems the editors selected are excellent, but they could easily have been substituted by work of a handful of others, some fresh out of MFA programs. Questions arise: Among the chosen "new poets," why more Kenneth Koch than Denise Levertov? Why were Edmund Rolfe, Kenneth Patchen, Sol Funaroff, Horace Gregory, and Lola Ridge not included among the proletarian poets of the 1930s? Why yes to Bob Dylan and no to Woody Guthrie? Despite such inevitable disagreements, this is a valuable anthology that allows readers to discover in voices of newer poets the echoes of poets who came before--sometimes hundreds of years before. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Lower-/upper-division undergraduates; graduate students. B. Wallenstein CUNY City College