The Best American Poetry 1999 [Paperback]

The 1999 edition ofThe Best American Poetrywill exceed the expectations of the many thousands of readers who eagerly await the annual arrival of this truly memorable anthology (Chicago Tribune).Guest editor Robert Bly, an award-winning poet and translator -- famous, too, for his leadership role in the men's movement and his bestselling book,Iron John-- has made selections that present American poetry in all its dazzling originality, richness, and variety. The year's poems are striking in their vibrancy; they all display that essential energy that Bly calls heat, whether the heat of friendship, the heat of form, or the heat that results when a poet brings the soul up close to the thing he or she is contemplating. With comments from the poets illuminating their work,The Best American Poetry 1999reflects the most exciting and memorable poetry being written at the end of the millennium.DICK ALLEN

The Selfishness of the Poetry Reader

Sometimes I think I'm the only man in America

who reads poems

and who walks at night in the suburbs,

calling the moon names.

And I'm certain I'm the single man who owns

a house with bookshelves,

who drives to work without a CD player,

taking the long way, by the ocean breakers.

No one else, in all America,

quotes William Meredith verbatim,

cites Lowell over ham and eggs, and Levertov;

keepsAntiworldsandArielbeside his bed.

Sometimes I think no other man alive

is changed by poetry, has fought

as utterly as I have over Sunday Morning

and vowed to love those difficult as Pound.

No one else has seen a luna moth

flutter over Iowa, or watched

a woman's hand lift rainbow trout from water,

and snow fall onto Minnesota farms.

This country wide, I'm the only man

who spends his money recklessly on thin

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