01/07/2001

By Tom Mayo / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Congratulations! Your friends and family thought so highly of you that they gave you a holiday gift certificate redeemable at a local or online bookstore. They know your tastes are quirky and that chances were good you had already bought most of the books that looked like really terrific gifts. Now, what are you going to do with that certificate? Why, you're going to get the gift that keeps on giving: poetry.

There are lots of poetry books from which to choose, but today's recommendations are limited to titles released during the past 12 months or so, for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is that these titles stand the best chance of still being available from publishers, whose loyalty to poets approximates the half-life of the average thorium isotope. Although many great poets published fine collections in 2000, this list skips over new works by individuals in favor of works reviewers were less likely to have noticed.

Anthologies

The standout this year was The New Penguin Book of English Verse, edited by Paul Keegan (Penguin Press, £20, about $30). This collection may require a special order through your bookseller because of its British publisher, but the effort will be well worth it. Between the two Geoffreys (Chaucer and Hill), it covers the centuries (from the 14th through the end of the 20th) in tidy fashion. There is a good selection of Irish and Scottish poets, as well as expatriates such as Hill, Paul Muldoon (recently repatriated as the Oxford Professor in Poetry), Eavan Boland and Thom Gunn, and reverse expatriates such as Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The anthology would not be remarkable were it not for the order in which the poems are presented: not clustered around individual authors in chronological order based on birth dates, but in the order in which the poems first appeared in print. This provides a fresh look at English poetry through juxtapositions that are by turns startling, fresh and instructive. It is amazing to read a poet across hundreds of pages and alongside contemporaries whose poems constituted the other side of the ongoing "conversation" that poetry represents. Michael Schmidt makes much of this conversation in his monumental history, Lives of the Poets, (Random House, $16) released in paperback in October.

First Loves, edited by Carmela Ciuraru (Scribner, $22): 68 poems with no more in common than their selection as an "essential" poem that inspired a prominent practicing poet. The introductions turn this anthology into a masters' class that satisfies on every page.

Collected, selected

Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997 (Harcourt, $17 paperback): This is the paperback version of the Polish Nobel Laureate's definitive collection. I'm cheating, because the hardcover was first published in 1998, not 2000, but if the paperback's appearance is the excuse you need to pick it up, run, don't walk, and get it today.

Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30): Brodsky often wrote in English, but he also translated many of his Russian-language poems, either by himself or with some of the best poets writing today. Collected Poems is the definitive record of this part of his output, and it amply illustrates the strengths that led to his selection as poet laureate of the United States and Nobel laureate in 1987.

Billy Collins, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes (Picador £6.99, about $10.50): This is another special-order item from the U.K., but until Random House comes out with Sailing Alone Around the Room ($22) due out this April, it's the only way you are going to get a volume of "selected and collected" by the best-selling poet in America today. "Best-selling" in years past might have meant over- or under-wrought and sappy (remember Rod McKuen?) or earnest jottings by the rich and famous (Jewel, A Night Without Armor, 1998). In 2001 it refers to an adventurer whose poems are often funny and always more than they seem.

Books about poetry

Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (Norton, $27.50): For the reader who wants to know more about how a poem works, this book, whose authors are distinguished poets in their own right, is a great start. The writing is crisp, the pacing is brisk, and illustrative poems abound. Mr. Strand has collected his own essays on "poetic invention" in The Weather of Words (Alfred A. Knopf, $22), a sort of senior seminar to follow the freshman lectures in the Norton Anthology.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, what is poetry (Creative Arts, $9.95): A poetic version of the legendary Beat poet's radio lectures from the 1950s. Cool.

Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Harvard University Press, $22.95): Borges' "lost lectures" from his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, 1967-1968. Hot.

John Ashbery, Other Traditions (Harvard University Press $22.95): Mr. Ashbery discusses six poets who will be unfamiliar to most readers but whose work the poet often consults to get his own creative juices flowing. In the end, we may have learned more about Mr. Ashbery and his poetry than about his subjects, but it's all good.

Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.