Natasha Trethewey and David Lehman, ads, _The Best American Poetry 2017_

ED HIRSCH (LAST year's guest editor) and Natasha Trethewey both strike me as good choices for this particular job, but I wish they had not been chosen in consecutive years, because their tastes run in very similar channels. Fourteen poets appear in both the 2016 and 2017 volumes, which seems to me a bit higher than average, and most of the poems first appeared in long-legacied, via media journals titled The [X] Review, where [X] = a state or a university or both. Hirsch includes more sonnets than Trethewey (but Trethewey has sonnets), Trethewey more topical poems than Hirsch (but Hirsch has topical poems), and the tilt for both is towards personal content with a bias towards the elegiac in plain-but-literate language arranged in longer sentences.

All of which makes for good reading, I acknowledge, but having these volumes back-to-back suggests the spectrum of American poetry is a lot narrower than it is. Since no poet-editor is ever, ever going to pick 75 poems that truly represent that spectrum in its fullness, I wish David Lehman would mix it up every year, as in the great Creeley-Komunyakaa-Hejinian-Muldoon run of 2002-05. I'm not going to fetch them down from the shelves to check, but I'll bet there were no years with fourteen repeaters in those volumes.

Enough griping. Sorry. It's a good collection. Trethewey includes some longer poems--her 75 poems require 170 pages to Hirsch's 146--and they're really interesting (those by Monica Youn, R. T. Smith, John Murillo, and Joyce Carol Oates deserve particular mention). A feeling of stressed-and-strained spirituality shows up frequently, in prayers (or near-prayers) by C. Dale Young and Pamela Sutton, Christian Wiman's "Prelude," and Maggie Smith's "Good Bones," which makes me wish the U.S.A. had a refrigerator, so I could put it there under a refrigerator magnet so everyone would see it every day.

Sllghtly weird thing: two different poets (Aracelis Girmay and Rowan Ricardo Phillips) use the same self-addressed imperative Elizabeth Bishop used in "One Art"--"say it." Is this a trope now?