I wasn't overwhelmed by this edition of The Best American Poetry, although there are some really good poems in it. Robert Creeley's selection in general leans toward formal experiment, the "avant garde," an approach which I happen to like . . . .

Some of the poems that to me stand out: Jenny Boully's longish prose poem "The Body;" Mông-Lan's "The Trail," another long poem, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti-like line-arrangements; Nathaniel Mackey's "On Antiphon Island" and Normam Finkelstein's "Drones and Chants," which both at least echo more traditional poetic formality; and "Address to Winnie in Paris," a sort of amatory go-between prose poem by Sarah Manguso. And there's other good stuff here.

It isn't possible, I think, to read any larger anthology of poems like this one (though this one isn't really that large) in the same way you would read a novel, straight through from beginning to end, and properly digest all of it; at least it isn't for me most of the time. Then too the placement-scheme for these "Best American Poetry" anthologies is alphabetical, by author's last name, and thus basically arbitrary; thus the cognitive and associative leap one is required to make from one poem to the next can be pretty huge . . . . So this book, with the poems I found more interesting dog-eared for future re-reading, goes onto the shelf of books to which I dutifully (or impulsively) return from time to time with the hope that I might "get" some of what I missed.