The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

Dazzling in its range, exhilarating in its immediacy and grace, this collection gathers together, from every region of the country and from the past forty years, the poems that continue to shape our imaginations. From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Gluck, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry's daring energies and its tender understandings.

But I don't understand why some poets aren't represented as extensively as others. Rita Dove has a great body of work but there are only three of her poems in here, they aren't lengthy either. Gjertrud Schnackenburg is another example. Most of the poets that got slighted are at the back of the book. Perhaps the editor ran out of room.

With that said this anthology was a step up from my previous poetry reading endeavors. There is great variety in this book ranging from very "accessible" classics like Roethke's "The Waking" and Wright's "A Blessing", and much longer and more difficult (for me) poems like Merrills "Lost in Translation". The introductory mini-biographies are cool and the general introduction is interesting. I also like the clever cover art. Nothing says America like a blank billboard.

To a poetry neophyte like myself this book is a challenge, but not overwhelming. I look forward to buying the complete works of many of the poets I discovered in it.

As to certain omissions, it seems like this anthology was geared toward the academic highbrow crowd. Hence no Bukowski, Wendell Berry, Stephen Dobyns, Thomas Lux or Raymond Carver....oh the list could go on. There is nothing wrong with these voices, they are distinctly American though and at least one "rough" voice would have been cool.

On a final note why is there no William Carlos Williams in here? Maybe he missed the cutoff date and was a little too old. Oh well.

I stumbled upon this book when I was in high school. One day, while browsing through the library during a free period, I noticed this book out of the corner of my eye. I had always been interested in modern poetry, and I thought I'd give this one a try. I found this book to be an incredible anthology of many great writers of what I consider to be one of the most poetic generations to date. I HIGHLY reccommend this anthology to anyone who is interested in contemporary poetry, or any poetry in general. There is something in this book for everybody. You will NOT be disappointed.

A required textbook for a poetry class, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry is a flawed but satisfying anthology that is a great pick up for new readers and students to the world of poetry. Seventy-five poets are featured in the anthology, including mainstays and well-knowns like Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Mark Doty, and Yusef Komunyakaa among others. Editor J.D. McClatchy provides a short biography of each poet to go along with a handful of poems (usually six or seven) that differ in the length of a quarter page to several. This format is the ultimate flaw of the anthology, along with a few glaring omissions (no Frost or Hughes? then again, this has the words "Vintage" and "Contemporary" in the same title, which is as much an oxymoron as I can think of) thanks to McClatchy, but despite all that, the anthology ends up working well for what it's meant to do. All in all, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry is best suited for newbies or students (as these poems have been featured in previous, and better, volumes and anthologies), and the cheaper list price doesn't hurt either.

This book is decidedly an anthology of poets rather than poems: everyone gets at least three pages and a half-page introduction. It's also fairly encyclopedic and catholic. The main use of an anthology of this type is to give the interested reader a quick idea of what, say, Merwin or Ashbery or Clampitt is all about. This task it discharges quite well.

Now for the flaws. There are some idiosyncratic omissions, which hurt the book; regardless of what McClatchy thinks of Robert Bly, he should have included a few of his poems and let the reader judge for himself. Similarly with Stanley Kunitz. I assume McClatchy likes Thom Gunn and left him out for being British, which is a little silly because he spent most of his life in California. These omissions make the book a little less complete as a reference.

More seriously, the anthology is a hard slog because so many of the poems are at least a couple of pages long. This means you can't dip in at random and read a poem and be surprised -- which is what anthologies are traditionally for. It would be a more readable book if there were fewer interminable blank verse meditations, many of them unengaging and not very characteristic -- e.g. one would not realize from the selections that Merrill and Hecht were masters of poetic form. That said, one does get some idea of each voice if one persists.

A persistent pattern in this period is the mid-career switch from highly formal verse to a distinctive personal style. (Lowell, Berryman, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Plath...) It's fascinating to see the mature style next to the earlier style; the book does this sometimes, but not with Merwin.

On the whole this anthology is a slightly unhappy medium. It would have served its purpose better if it had been more conventional; on the other hand I'd have really liked to see an unabashedly personal anthology that more vividly reflected McClatchy's own tastes. Still, what we have is a useful introduction to a very rich period.

If you've ever been disappointed by the inconsistent quality of poems found in the "Best American Poetry" series published by Scribner (with series editor David Lehman), this anthology will show you why. Not every poem will give you chills or connect with your soul, but not a single one is bad or banal.