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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
A flawed but satisfying anthology:
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... more info
Useful despite its flaws:
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... more info
Sets the bar for 'Best American Poetry':
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.
A Launch Pad For Poetry Lovers:
I bought a copy of the first edition of this book (much prettier cover I am sorry to say) in high school. I thumbed through it, over and over, finding new and different poems to savor, getting exposed to countless amazing poets whose full books now grace my shelves (Anthony Hecht, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Mona Van Duyn, Howard Nemerov). This book, by choosing generally shorter poems that catch your eye (with some exceptions) by a host of excellent modern poets with tremendous variations in styles,... more info
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