The Best American Poetry

"Ammons's sly and sometimes bawdy humor turns up more frequently in his extended poems, which are spacious and inclusive, accommodating everything from hymns and credos to memos received and jokes overheard. Ammons's short poems tend, by contrast, to be compressed and intense meditations on nature and natural phenomena." ~ Archie: A profile of A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) by David Lehman When reading The Best American Poetry series, it is especially helpful to understand the motivations of the Guest editor who assists David Lehman in the selection of poems from a variety of literary journals. A.R. Ammons' selections are honest, unconventional, passionate, intimate, sensual and at times overtly erotic. There is no shame in the honesty or the truth with which the writer's express human emotions, longings and at times awakening desire. "Time to admit my altar is a desk. Time to confess the cross I bear a pen. My soul, a little like a compact disc, Slides into place, a laser plays upon Its surface, and a sentimental mist," ~Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets Here we find poems that reach across boundaries, address profound experiences, charm with form and convince us that frankness in poetry is perhaps what we sometimes long for because it presents a place of free expression where doors fly open and we reach the depths of human expression. Poems about death, science, nature, childbirth, snow, Greek mythology, alcoholism, snow take the moods from profound to humorous in a heart beat. Rebecca Byrkit's completely chaotic poem: "The Only Dance There Is" blows the lid off the idea of "gritty real." At times you are not quite sure if you are reading a poem or a confession of a life lived in wild abandon. The poem is rich with scents, visual references, sounds and bawdy humor. A girl named Tracey, who owned this book before me had lovingly place little x's on the listings in the contents page. It seems she enjoyed Tom Andrews', "Cinema Verite," Catherine Bowman's "Demographics," Mark Doty's "Difference," Alice Fulton's "The Priming Is a Negligee," and Janet Holmes, "The Love of the Flesh." She also enjoyed Carl Phillips' "A Mathematics of Breathing" which has a very intriguing conclusion. My favorite line in the book is from Allison Funk's poem: "After Dark" where she writes: "weakens a soft bank until, thunder from afar, it collapses into water." The conclusion of her poem speaks of A.R. Ammons' love of nature and the entire poem is truly stunning in the way it pulls in images from nature to express deeply profound emotions and experiences. Denise Duhamel's "Bulimia" is startling in it's portrayal of a societal problem brought on by a desire for perfection. Charles Bukowski speaks of domestic abuse in "me against the world." Debora Greger's "The Frog in the Swimming Pool" brought "scent memories" of long-forgotten childhood experiences while living on a farm. "A wet green velvet scums the swimming pool, furring the cracks. The deep end swims in a hat