A complete, well edited anthology. Contains the well known and expected, but the minor or lesser known works are of excellent quality and worth remembering. ( )

The Oxford Book of American Poetry is the perfect poetry book for poetry lovers. It has every poet one could ever imagine from America and is always surprising me by helping me find new poetry that I love. I would recommend this poetry book to any poetry lover. ( )

This new edition is considerably larger than the previous ones, and I've been working on it for a month or so. I discovered some new poets, some old friends, and faithfully slogged through some poems I remembered hating. I was right about them, but one never knows. Poetry, I've found, is very fluid, and poems resonate differently for me through the years. There's no way I feel adequate to review a book on this scale, a book of this scope, except to say that if you like poetry it's certainly worth perusing. If you hate poetry, read the quote by William Matthews below, and be free.

The poems new to me with which I fell in love:
Amaze by Adelaide Crapsey
The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm by Wallace Stevens
Before Disaster by Yvor Winters
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
The Lost Children by Randall Jarrell
Why Regret by Galway Kinnell
The Return by Philip Levine
At 65 by Richard Howard
Forty Something by Robert Hass
Celestial Music and
Vespers by Louise Gluck
Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
Form by Heather McHugh


And last, this gem from the blurb about William Matthews
"He once observed that most published poems fall into one of four thematic categories: '1. I went out in the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious. 2. We're not getting any younger. 3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey. 4) Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent and on we know not what.'" ( )