Excellent books are equally enjoyable and insightful

12/15/2002

By TOM MAYO / The Dallas Morning News

Looking for a gift that won't end up forgotten and unused? Not a problem.

Here is a perfectly arbitrary and hopelessly incomplete list of excellent books of poetry from the past 12 months. A second collection of equally enjoyable titles could be assembled without repeating any mentioned here. That's one definition of a good year for poetry, which 2002 surely was.

• Anthologies. Garrison Keillor ends each installment of his daily five-minute radio program, "The Writer's Almanac," with a poem, usually a short one that can be read in about a minute. But he often finds poems that have the quality he calls "stickiness, memorability." Good Poems (Viking, $25.95) puts a couple of hundred of the most memorable into 19 chapters and slaps a first-rate introductory essay on the whole thing.

• Coffee-table books for the brain. The hands-down champ in this category is The Dickinsons of Amherst, photos by Jerome Liebling (University Press of New England, $55). This visually stunning book offers an intimate look into Emily Dickinson's home town and the two Dickinson homes on Amherst's Main Street, accompanied by insightful and scholarly, but readable, essays and (too few) poems by the midwife of modern American poetry.

• Poets talking about poetry. This is a perennially bloated category, and I do not pretend to choose a "winner": You might start, however, with An Introduction to English Poetry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20) by James Fenton, former professor of poetry at Oxford and author of the book for the musical Les Miserables. Derived from – but much more lucid than – his 50-week master class for the British newspaper The Independent in 1990, this deserves a place on your bookshelf.

• Texas talent. In this precarious time for residents of the Middle East, what better opportunity than now to turn to poetry to affirm common threads that bind Muslims, Christians and Jews, and to discover the uniqueness of Arab existence in the Palestinian homeland? That is the gift of San Antonio's Naomi Shihab Nye in her timely collection, 19 Varieties of Gazelle (Greenwillow, $16.95). The 60 poems cover a range of emotion and experience as vast as the history of the Arab people themselves.

Wings Press is another San Antonio treasure: a small press that keeps publishing – against all odds – poetry of sublime delicacy and power. The Angel of Memory (Wings Press, $17.95) by Marjorie Agosin spans continents and centuries in search of the author's Jewish great-grandmother and her life before, during and after the Holocaust in Hamburg, Vienna, Prague and Santiago. It is translated by Brigid Milligan and Laura Rocha Nakazawa. I leave it to others to judge the work as translation, but as poetry it is unforgettable.

• Home schooling. The best news of the year for students of poetry was the appearance of the second edition of Helen Vendler's Poems – Poets – Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Bedford/St. Martin's Press, $51.15 paperback ). For writers and readers alike, this book has it all. A lifetime of close reading and teaching undergraduates at Harvard has put Ms. Vendler at the head of the class, and her readable text sets a very high standard for all others in this field.

• Poetry. Even before Poetry magazine learned of a Lilly heir's $100 million gift, it was already having a pretty good year, what with the publication of The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002 (Ivan R. Dee, $29.95) and Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters (Norton, $35). Both books are edited by Joseph Parisi, Poetry's editor-in-chief, and Stephen Young, its senior editor. Poetry claims to have published "virtually every significant poet of the twentieth century," and the anthology lives up to the boast. A fine introduction traces the magazine's history, and the poems themselves are an impressive lot. Dear Editor, on the other hand, offers the fun of eavesdropping on many of our most luminous poets as they wheedle for larger advances, complain of their shabby treatment by the editors and gossip about each other.

• Light verse about farm critters. Roy Blount Jr. scores in this decidedly narrow category with Am I Pig Enough for You Yet? (Voices of the Barnyard) (HarperCollins, $20). Photographs by Valerie Shaff are a picture-perfect foil to Mr. Blount's post-Nashian nuttiness. Hee haw, indeed.

Want more? I have additional recommendations on my Web site at http://faculty.smu.edu/tmayo/poetry_picks.htm. Happy giving!

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.