2003 brought a bounty of worthy anthologies and studies of verse

By TOM MAYO / The Dallas Morning News

The year 2003 was a strong one for poetry, which makes any "Best of" list an exercise in arbitrary exclusion. But if you are looking for worthy volumes for the poetry-lover on your gift list, here are some of my favorites from the year just ending.

Short takes: While we were waiting for Library of America to produce new volumes in its impressive "American Poetry: The Twentieth Century" series, LOA issued seven little books of poetry, priced at $20 each, in a new series, "American Poets Project." Five volumes are devoted to individual poets (Edgar Allan Poe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Yvor Winters, Walt Whitman and Karl Shapiro), and two are anthologies ( Poets of World War II and American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse ). Edited by major poets or scholars, these collections are incredibly strong and, despite the dominance of familiar names, surprisingly fresh.

Out of the mystic: Bryce Milligan's Wings Press in San Antonio has for many years published some of the finest poetry in the Southwest, but this year it's Mr. Milligan's turn to soar, and soar he does with Alms for Oblivion (Aark Arts, $20). This magical mystery tour of a poem draws from Shakespeare, Beowulf, Sumerian myths and poetry, Aztec traditions, quantum physics and modern chess masters, to name but a few of Mr. Milligan's inspirations. Read this poem 10 times and you will experience 10 different poems – quite a feat.

Poetry, what it's about: Harvard's grande dame of poetry, Helen Vendler, produced a wonderful book this year: Coming of Age as a Poet (Harvard University Press, $22.95). Using Milton, Keats, Eliot and Plath as her case studies, Ms. Vendler "consider[s] the work a young poet has to have done before writing his or her first 'perfect' poem – the poem which first wholly succeeds in embodying a coherent personal style." This is a bold claim and a challenging book, but Ms. Vendler succeeds brilliantly in keeping us hooked. By the end we are better readers.

Michael Schmidt argued in Lives of the Poets that poetry across the centuries should be understood as a continuous "conversation" about language in general and poetry in particular. In this view, every poem is in some sense "about poetry," but some poems are more expressly about poetry than others. In This Art (Copper Canyon Press, $12 paperback), Michael Wiegers collects more than 100 poems about poetry. It would be a better anthology if he had cast his net more widely and relied a bit less on poets in the Copper Canyon stable, but this is still a lively and thought-provoking collection.

Big dogs: Pound for pound, hour after hour, it's hard to beat a great anthology. At an impressive four pounds and 2,200 pages, this year's heavyweight champ is The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd edition (Norton, $75, two volumes, paperback), edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair. Drawing from all sources of English-language poetry, this collection has a markedly international feel. Unbelievably, considering the collection's heft, most of the selections will leave the reader wishing for more poems from each writer, which may actually be a measure of its success. On the other hand, when a collection of this size and ambition pointedly and inexplicably excludes the poetry of Billy Collins, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon and any number of fine regional poets from around the United States, something's happening here (as Buffalo Springfield once crooned) and what it is ain't exactly clear.

Three other anthologies are perfect in their own way. The latest in Alfred A. Knopf's Everyman's Library series is Doggerel: Poems About Dogs ($12.50), edited by Carmela Ciuraru (who is quickly becoming my favorite anthologist; see also: First Loves and Poems for America). From Pope and Chaucer to Swenson and Tate (and, yes, to Collins, Hall and Kenyon), this little collection is surprisingly good. From the good folks who bring us the Poetry Daily Web site (www.poems.com), there is Poetry Daily (Sourcebooks, $14.95 paperback), edited by Diane Boller, Don Selby and Chryss Yost – 366 poems by 366 contemporary poets, the best of the daily postings from the Web site's past six years. Is poetry dead? Not judging from the evidence in these pages, whose poems will please or provoke every reader. Lastly, Shooting the Rat, edited by Mark Pawlak, Dick Lourie, Ron Schreiber and Robert Hershon (Hanging Loose Press, $16 paperback) pulls together startlingly fine poems and stories by very accomplished high-school writers.

Individual efforts: A wrap-up of 2003 would not be complete without mention of three books that left a lasting impression long after their covers were closed. Rafael Campo's The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry (W.W. Norton, $22.95) combines the poetry and professional tales of a gifted physician-poet. Sherod Santos is one of this country's very best emerging poets, and this year's The Perishing (W.W. Norton, $21.95) shows why. These are poems that are historical, philosophical, political, personal and powerful. And let us not overlook J.M. Coetzee's Landscape With Rowers (Princeton University Press, $19.95), the Nobel Prize-winning novelist's translation of six modern Dutch poets – exemplars of a "minor literature" in a "minor language" who deserve to be remembered.

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