This Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

• Published in: World Literature Today Vol. 91; no. 3-4; pp. 116 - 117
• Main Author: Florczyk, Piotr
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Norman Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma 01.08.2017; University of Oklahoma
• Subjects: Anthologies; Dove, Rita; Miscellaneous; Poetry; United States > US; Massachusetts
• ISSN: 0196-3570; 1945-8134
• DOI: 10.7588/worllitetoda.91.3-4.0116

Any pretense to inclusivity only harks back to poetry's own insecurity about its place in the world. Since nobody reads poems, we are reminded often enough, it's better, the editors assume, to knock down than put up fences. [...]because a companion essay follows each of the poems, we become privy to Burt's critical mind while he illuminates how every poem lets us "imagine someone else's interior life, almost as if it were or could have been ours" and the myriad forms in which "it can reveal, or upend, the assumptions and habits that go without saying when we use language in less usual ways." Robert Hass's "Our Lady of the Snows," for example, is a fine poem but hardly representative of the former US poet laureate, who "normally writes longer, looser, poems, focused (in general) on the present moment, his family life, his travels, or the news."