100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century

As Strand states in this introduction, this book presents a 100 great poems of the 20th century, not the 100 great poems of the 20th century. The selection naturally reflects Strand's personal but excellent taste. He has caste a wide net, including poets from several European countries, Latin America, Turkey, and Israel, as well as a generous selection of American poets. Some very famous poems are presented but also some less known but worthy poems by famous poets. Strand has also tried to balance the nature of the poems, including both humourous and serious works, hence the inclusion of a poem by Ogden Nash and a relatively lighthearted poem by the Spanish poet Alberti. Some readers may be disappointed by the exclusion of some of their favorite poems. I, for example, would have chosen different poems by William Carlos Williams, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, but Strand has certainly chosen well. Perhaps because Strand is himself an accomplished poet, I think some poems have been selected on the basis of what might be called technical merit, demonstrations of how to achieve a variety of effects via poetic efforts. The best part of this anthology, like all good anthologies, is encountering important but unfamiliar works. This anthology features a number of powerful works probably unknown to most of the reading public in this country. Reading Thom Gunn's Lament or the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet's Things I Didn't Know I Loved is worth the price of the book.

Poet Laureate Mark Strand has selected well-known voices, as well as the more obscure poets, "a carefully chosen sampler juxtaposing long and short form, experimental and traditional style, expected and surprising choices." These are the voices of the 2oth century, an international collection, half from outside of the United States, some translated from other languages, a mix of humor and drama, designed for those who love poetry and those who are just discovering the beauty of this form. A distinction: these are not the hundred great poems of the century, but a hundred poems, surely enough to whet any appetite, a kaleidoscope of images as viewed by individuals, representing North and South America and Europe, the North American poets limited to those born after 1927. The voice of war rings loud, the memory of loss still fresh and wounding, the world scarred by conflict, the horrors endured: "Up there in the Aleutians they are knocking the gold teeth out of the dead Japanese" and... "You know by now there isn't much to live for except to spite Hitler- The war is so lurid that everything else is dull." (Ruth Stone, "That Winter") For those who live day to day in managed care, white-sheathed nurses watching, evening brings quiet, one more passing of a burdened day: "It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bone needles of the games of anagram and bridge; The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask." (Louise Bogan, "Evening in the Sanitarium") There are musings of death, choices made and wisdom gleaned in flashes, images that strike like lightning, illuminating: "I am bound by my own thirty-year-old decision: who drinks the wine Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment New discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down their bones: I must wear mine." (Robinson Jeffers, "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones") Richard Wright's "I Have Seen Black Hands" calls a nation to acknowledge the struggle, the great anguish of bent backs, hard work and irreconcilable loss: "And the black hands strained and clawed and struggled in vain at the noose that tightened about the black throat, And the black hands waved and beat fearfully at the tall flames that cooked and charred the black flesh... And some day- and it is only this which sustains me- Someday there shall be millions and millions of them, On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!" Through the passage of the century, memories cling, fragments of the past, forgotten until discovered in the bottom of a drawer, or glimpsed in a photograph: "No it was not because it was too far you failed to visit me that day or night. From year to year it grows in us until it takes hold I understood it as you did: indifference." (Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for N.N.") Here are the words of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, W.H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Michaux, Ranier Maria Rilke, Theo

I would actually give this book 4.5 stars if I had the choice, but not 5. The poems are very different and original. All of them had a certain specialness, a deepness, if you will, that made them worth-while to read. My personal favorites are "I once saw a man pursuing the horizon", "A postcard from the volcano", and "Observation Car".