The Best American Poetry 2007, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by poet Heather McHugh, guest editor, who made the final selections, and David Lehman, the general editor for the series.
This book is the 20th volume in the most popular annual poetry anthology in the United States. Along with popular poets who have often appeared in previous editions, such as Billy Collins, Louise Gluck and Galway Kinnell, the book includes poets of "off-center traditions" such as Rae Armantrout and Christian Bok. Some of McHugh's selections from newer poets "tend toward the experimental," according to a review in Publishers Weekly, which pointed to poems from Ben Lerner and Danielle Pafunda as evidence of this. Publishers Weekly called it a "riskier than usual volume."[1]
Richard Wakefield, reviewing the volume in The Seattle Times, wrote that McHugh's selections were "as eccentric, sometimes as unabashedly goofy, as any in the series' two decades," but among them were a couple of dozen "very fine" poems. Wakefield in particular praised the poems by Carmine Starnino and Brad Leithauser, but called the Nicky Beer selection merely "clever prose arranged as questions and answers," and that poem's inclusion probably due to a common "weakness" among poets for wordplay. McHugh's essay introducing the volume was briefer than those of most of her predecessors, according to Wakefield, but was itself almost worth the cost of the book and contains some phrasing "as good as anything in the volume."[2]
In her review of the book for The Tampa Tribune, Karen Haymon wrote that the poems by established poets generally outshone the work of the lesser-known writers, with plenty of poems "good and worth reading" by established names such as Billy Collins, Donald Hall, and Robert Hass. However, Haymon called a poem by Brian Turner, an Iraq veteran, a pleasant discovery.[3]
Poets and poems included
Listed in alphabetical order by author's name:
| Poet | Poem | Publication where poem previously appeared |
| Kazim Ali | "The Art of Breathing" | Barrow Street |
| Jeannette Allee | "Crimble of Staines" | Field |
| Rae Armantrout | "Scumble" | American Poet |
| Mary Jo Bang | "The Opening" | Verse |
| Nicky Beer | "Still Life with Half-Turned Woman and Questions" | Beloit Poetry Journal |
| Marvin Bell | "The Method" | Crazyhorse |
| Christian Bok | "Vowels" | New American Writing |
| Louis E. Bourgeois | "A Voice from the City" | Sentence |
| Geoffrey Brock | "Flesh of John Brown's Flesh: Dec. 2, 1859" | Subtropics |
| Matthew Byrne | "Let Me Count the Ways" | Poet Lore |
| Macgregor Card | "Duties of an English Foreign Secretary" | Fence |
| Julie Carr | "marriage" | POOL |
| Michael Collier | "Common Flicker" | TriQuarterly |
| Billy Collins | "The News Today" | Bookforum |
| Robert Creeley | "Valentine for You" | Crazyhorse |
| Linh Dinh | "Continuous Bullets over Flattened Earth and A Super-Clean Country" | New American Writing |
| Mike Dockins | "Dead Critics Society" | Atlanta Review |
| Sharon Dolin | "Tea Lay" | New American Writing |
| Denise Duhamel | "Language Police Report" | Sentence |
| Stephen Dunn | "Where He Found Himself" | Iowa Review |
| Russell Edson | "See Jack" | Sentence |
| Elaine Equi | "Etudes" | the tiny |
| Landis Everson | "Lemon Tree" | American Poetry Review |
| Thomas Fink | "Yinglish Strophes IX" | Barrow Street |
| Helen Ransom Forman | "Daily" | Michigan Quarterly Review |
| Louise Gluck | "Archaic Fragment" | Poetry |
| Albert Goldbarth | "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" | New Letters |
| Donald Hall | "The Master" | American Poetry Review |
| Mark Halliday | "Best Am Po" | POOL |
| Forrest Hamer | "Initiation" | American Poetry Review |
| Matthea Harvey | "From The Future of Terror/Terror of the Future Series" | Bomb |
| Robert Hass | "Bush's War" | American Poetry Review |
| Jane Hirshfield | "Critique of Pure Reason" | Ploughshares |
| Daniel Johnson | "Do Unto Others" | Barrow Street |
| Richard Kenney | "Auguries" | Southwest Review |
| Milton Kessler | "Comma of God" | Sentence |
| Galway Kinnell | "Hide-and-Seek, 1933" | Beloit Poetry Journal |
| David Kirby | "Ode to the Personals" | Five Points |
| Julie Larios | "What Bee Did" | The Cortland Review |
| Brad Leithauser | "A Good List" | The New Criterion |
| Ben Lerner | "From Angle of Yaw" | Beloit Poetry Journal |
| Joanie Mackowski | "When I was a dinosaur" | POOL |
| Amit Majmudar | "By Accident" | The Antioch Review |
| Sabrina Orah Mark | "The 10 Stages of Beatrice" | Conduit |
| Campbell McGrath | "Ode to the Plantar Fascia" | POOL |
| Leslie Adrienne Miller | "On Leonardo's Drawings" | The Kenyon Review |
| Marilyn Nelson | "Etymology" | Literary Imagination |
| Meghan O'Rourke | "Peep Show" | The Kenyon Review |
| Ed Ochester | "Voltaire at Cirey, 1736" | Barrow Street |
| Gregory Orr | "From Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved" | RATTLE |
| Danielle Pafunda | "Dear Pearce & Pearce, Inc." | Denver Quarterly |
| Chad Parmenter | "A Tech's Ode to Genome Computer" | The Kenyon Review |
| Susan Parr | "Swooping Actuarial Fauna and Ecstatic Cling" | Alaska Quarterly Review |
| Peter Pereira | "Nursmaid's Elbow" | New England Review |
| Robert Pinsky | "Stupid Meditation on Peace" | The New Yorker |
| Robert Pinsky | "Louie Louie" | American Poetry Review |
| David Rivard | "The Rev. Larry Love is Dead" | TriQuarterly |
| Marya Rosenberg | "If I Tell You You're Beautiful, Will You Report Me?: A West Point Haiku Series" | Hanging Loose |
| Natasha Saje | "F" | Beloit Poetry Journal |
| Frederick Seidel | "The Death of the Sha" | Raritan Quarterly Review |
| Alan Shapiro | "Country Western Singer" | The Virginia Quarterly Review |
| David Shumate | "Drawing Jesus" | Gulf Coast |
| Carmine Starnino | "Money" | New American Writing |
| Brian Turner | "What Every Soldier Should Know" | American Poet |
| Arthur Vogelsang | "The Family" | Colorado Review |
| Cody Walker | "Coulrophobia" | Tarpaulin Sky |
| Kary Wayson | "Flu Song in Spanish" | Alaska Quarterly Review |
| Charles Harper Webb | "Big" | Michigan Quarterly Review |
| Joe Wenderoth | "The Home of the Brave" | Sacramento News & Review |
| Richard Wilbur | "From Opposites and More Opposites" | American Poet |
| George Witte | "At Dusk, the Catbird" | The Vocabula Review |
| Theodor Worozbyt | "An Experiment" | Crazyhorse |
| Harriet Zinnes | "Remiss Rebut" | Colorado Review |
Publishing information
The book is published by Scribner.
224 pages
Hardcover: ISBN 978-0-7432-9972-5
Paperback: ISBN 978-0-7432-9973-2
ISBN 0-7432-9973-6
See also
Notes
- ↑ Brief book review, "The Best American Poetry 2007" in Publishers Weekly, July 30, 2007
- ↑ Via Newsbank Web site: Wakefield, Richard, "'Bestov, schmestov,' but these poems are pretty darned good", book review, The Seattle Times, September 23, 2007, accessed October 6, 2007
- ↑ Via Newsbank Web site: Long, Karen Haymon, "Best Of The Best 2007 Poems / Come From Familiar Poets", The Tampa Tribune, Tampa, Florida, September 16, 2007, accessed October 6, 2007