The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry

This groundbreaking volume may well be the poetry anthology for the global village. As selected by J.D. McClatchy, this collection includes masterpieces from four continents and more than two dozen languages in translations by such distinguished poets as Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Among the countries and writers represented are:

<li>Bangladesh--Taslima Nasrin

<li>Chile--Pablo Neruda

<li>China--Bei Dao, Shu Ting

<li>El Salvador--Claribel Alegria

<li>France--Yves Bonnefoy

<li>Greece--Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos

<li>India--A.K. Ramanujan

<li>Israel--Yehuda Amichai

<li>Japan--Shuntaro Tanikawa

<li>Mexico--Octavio Paz

<li>Nicaragua--Ernesto Cardenal

<li>Nigeria--Wole Soyinka

<li>Norway--Tomas Transtromer

<li>Palestine--Mahmoud Darwish

<li>Poland--Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz

<li>Russia--Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko

<li>Senegal--Leopold Sedar Senghor

<li>South Africa--Breyten Breytenbach

<li>St. Lucia, West Indies--Derek Walcott

This poetry anthology is a great find. I discovered many talented world poets with this book. Good information about each poet.

Given the daunting task of selecting from, literally, a world of poets, McClatchy succeeds admirably. Once again his editing has me running out to buy individual books by the poets in the anthology.

Now if he would do a book of "Contemporary English Language [But Non-American] Poetry" to offer closure....

An aspect of McClatchy's editing that I like is that the selection per poet is large enough to get a good introduction - the opposite is a fault of most anthologies - though this does cause worthy poets to excluded.

I would love for some publisher to publish this and Contemporary American Poetry in good hardbound versions. They are prized members of my library, but, sadly, are not durable.

A solid selection of poems written by major poets from around the globe. Diverse cultures represented. The quality of the translations is very good, making the poems accessible to English-speaking readers. One recurrent problem: no explanatory notes are provided to help English-speakers, particularly younger readers and college students, grasp the historical, political, social, or cultural allusions in some poems. For example, the Viet Nam poet Nguyen's "Model Citizens of the Regime" takes on fuller meaning if the reader knows that the "jail" referred to in the poem is not a penal institution for criminals but actually a communist re-education camp to which Vietnamese children were sent to be indoctrinated in Marxist ideology. Having a bit of this geopolitical, social, or cultural context, readers can gain a fuller understanding of the poems. One small complaint: the anthology was published prior to the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska's receipt of the Nobel Prize, and therefore the head note for her selection does not make note of that honor.

Given the general lack of interest in poetry, especially poetry from other countries, we're nonetheless lucky to have this anthology.