Edward Hirsch and David Lehman, eds, _The Best American Poetry 2016_

Yes...last year's. Took me a while to get around to it. I've had a difficult year, though I had it easier than many (hello, Houston & Puerto Rico).

I am among those who classify American poetry into two broad camps, but I'm not sure what to call them. Traditional and experimental? Those terms seem a poor fit, since someone like Ed Hirsch is obviously not experimental, but you wouldn't say he sounds much like Shelley or Robert Bridges or Frost--so what "tradition" are we talking about? Avant-garde and mainstream? But is any poet mainstream, given what a small and specific readership poetry has? If you're publishing poetry at all, you are already part of group that is basically on the margins compared to novelists, memoirists, biographers, and so on.

I am going to go with "representational" and "non-representational," as with painting. A great many (most, I'd say) poets are engaging with phenomena--persons, places, objects, events--with some investment in "getting it right," fidelity, accuracy, truth. Quite a few poets are more interested in what is generated by language itself, or problematizing the whole question of representation, to the point that asking what a poem is about is just the wrong question.

Representational poets can certainly dip into the toolkit of the non-representational ones, and vice versa, which I think was the point of the Cole Swenson and David St. John anthology, American Hybrid. (Which must be about ten years old now, I think). By and large, though, the two camps do not seem to be paying much attention to each other.

All the above is my wide turn into the point that Edward Hirsch, a representational poet, has (I would say) a 100% representational anthology here. This gives the book some consistency, but risks monotony. Sometimes the chance operations of the alphabet underline how like each other the chosen poems are. A poem by Rowan Ricardo Phillips of about two dozen lines in loose blank pentameter, syntactically all one sentence, is followed by a Stanley Plumly poem also of about two dozen lines in loose blank pentameter, this one in three sentences; one run of four poems includes three sonnets (Silver, Sleigh, Stallings).

Not that the work herein is weak. Just the contrary. Seventy-five really good, worthwhile poems, just as advertised. I do prefer it, though, when the editor decides (as did Denise Duhamel and Terrance Hayes) to mix it up a little.