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3.12.17

the year in poetry

What I've read rather than what's been published this year (small overlap) (and rather more each year, at least proportionately), similarly collated chronologically with unqualified short takes:

Pegasus Descending: a book of the best bad verse (James Camp, X.J. Kennedy, Keith Waldrop eds) [Burning Deck]: unfortunately no Stuffed Owl
Benjamin Fondane, Cinepoems and Others (var, Leonard Schwartz ed) [nyrbpoets]: strong selection across oeuvre of Romanian/French small-s surrealist [3AM]
Ezra Pound, Cathay: The Centennial Edition (Zhaoming Qian,ed) [New Directions]: historical significance (and controversies) overshadows merits (but does not reduce them)
Angélica Freitas, Rilke Shake (Hilary Kaplan) [Phoneme]: 2016 BTBA poetry winner, blending hi/lo working best for titular sequence, only occasionally otherwise [3%; samples]
Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry (Paul Blackburn) [nyrb]: good broad scope, fair rendering [RainTaxi]
Monica Youn, Blackacre [graywolf]: justly a contender for NBCC NBA PEN awards, strong and well-crafted [Stephen Burt's pick of '16 & interview]
Stephen Edgar, The Red Sea: New & Selected Poems [Baskerville]: put on to this by Clive James; selected well judged new less so
Tyehimba Jess, Olio [Wave]: delivers (partly on the strength of the underlying material and grounding and selection, partly on method [Susan Howe comes to mind]) ... it was on the radar as finalist at NBCC (poetry) and PEN (Jean Stein) and won the Pulitzer [topical cf]
Szilárd Borbély, Berlin-Hamlet (Ottilie Mulzet) [nyrb/poets]: a braid of postwar Berlin a la Benjamin, Hamlet, Kafka, and some Hungarian poets with whom I'm not familiar, more cumulative effect than local brilliance [BTBA poetry finalist]
Robert Creeley, Collected Poems 1945-1975 [California]: the stuff from the 60s and either side a couple years is Creeley at his best, syntactical master; what preceded (and to a lesser extent succeeded) more often slighter (not a function of brevity) but worthwhile beyond merely tracking development
John Berryman, The Dream Songs [FSG]: still filling in holes in my understanding of development of US poetry ...
Elsewhere (Eliot Weinberger, ed) [Open Letter]: small selection of translated travel poetry, loosely connected, Paris/NY/LA etc from outside [excerpt]
Abdellatif Laâbi, In Praise of Defeat (Donald Nicholson-Smith) [archipelago]: poems from across career selected by the author, French and englishing on facing pages, some of the music of language lost but that of idea preserved, runnerup for 2107 poetry BTBA [QC]
Odysseus Elytis, The Sovereign Sun (Kivion Friar) [Temple]: yes good but short of Cavafy, Seferis even as wider-ranging
John Kinsella, Jam Tree Gully [WWNorton]: Bush Thoreau, of place and place within, certainly competent but not my cuppa [JK thereon]
Susan Howe, Debths [NDP]: a little of everything that came before, a little of that this ... [Boston Review]
Luljeta Lleshanaku, Haywire: New and Selected Poems (various) [Bloodaxe] combines NDP's (US) Fresco & Child of Nature with a handful of new poems. (arguably) foremost among post-Hoxha Albanian poets, warmly recommended: from Peter Constantine's intropening:
Luljeta Lleshanaku is a pioneer of Albanian poetry. She speaks with a completely original voice, her imagery and language always unexpected and innovative. Her poetry has little connection to poetic styles past or present in America, Europe, or the rest of the world. And, interestingly enough, it is not connected to anything in Albanian poetry either. We have in Lleshanaku a completely original poet.
Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems [Anchor]: after mediocre debut (despite reception, and I'm being generous) hit his stride in the late 40s early 50s but after seldom returned to what made that work (eg North American Sequence), too often giving rhyme (if often slant) and meter precedence
Jean Toomer, The Collected Poems (ed Robert B. Jones & Margery Toomer Latimer) [UNC]: Curious sidebar to Harlem Renaissance; selection from aesthetic, ancestral consciousness, objective consciousness (Gurdjieff), and christian existential (Quaker) periods, incl from Cane in second case, and "The Blue Meridian" (Whitmanic) in third.
Nicanor Parra, Antipoems: How to look better and feel great (Liz Werner) [NDP]: good fun, sometimes slight but oft with bite of wit: eg via Bashō, "el poeta se viste de hombre rana / y se zambulle en la pileta del parque" (the poet dresses up as a frogman / and kerplunks into the pool in the park) [MAO; Edith Grossman]
Robert Desnos, Essential Poems and Writings (Mary Ann Caws ed and et al) [Black Widow]: less essential than I'd hoped, Desnos rightly overshadowed, though not without moments or merits
Virginia Hamilton Adair, Living on Fire [RandomHouse]: a fall-off from Ants on the Melon [downscroll]
Yu Jian, Flash Cards (Wang Ping & Ron Padgett) [Zenith]: Billy Collins-ish [WLT, 3%]

on deck: Guiseppe Gioachino Belli, Sonnets (Mike Stocks) [Oneworld] something to follow on Burgess' ABBA ABBA & Peter Dale's Strine

to be acquired: Thom Gunn, Selected Poems ...

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