I FAILED AGAIN in my annual quest to read one year's BAmPo before the next year's was published; the 2023 volume appeared in September, and I was only a few pages into this one.
What is up with that, by the way? How can this be the best American poetry of 2022 if it appeared when there were still four months left of 2022? Strictly speaking, this should be called 75 Excellent American Poems from the Last Half of 2021 and the First Half of 2022. Awkward, I know, but more accurate.
The poetry is this volume is right down the middle of the plate, we might say, not unlike Mr. Zapruder's own work: leaning heavily towards personal anecdote, language generally plain with lyrical flashes, occasional shadows cast by events in the wider world (the lockdown, the wildfires in California, Black Lives Matter).
I noted with interest that the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day site is well-represented--eight poems, more I think than any other single source.
The individual poems I think I will remember longest are Diane Seuss's "Modern Poetry" (about college classes she took on that subject--judging from the reading list, Seuss and I must be near exact contemporaries) and Michael Robins's "The Remaining Facts," about his wife's sudden death while she was on an out-of-town trip, an event the poem never directly mentions.
No comments:
Post a Comment