Hirsch Edward - The best American poetry, 2016

Praise for The Best American Poetry

Each year, a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable: and over the years, as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be.

Robert Pinsky

The Best American Poetry series has become one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world. For each volume, a guest editor is enlisted to cull the collective output of large and small literary journals published that year to select seventy-five of the years best poems. The guest editor is also asked to write an introduction to the collection, and the anthologies would be indispensable for these essays alone; combined with [David] Lehmans state-of-poetry forewords and the guest editors introductions, these anthologies seem to capture the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry.

Academy of American Poets

A high volume of poetic greatness... in all of these volumes... there is brilliance, there is innovation, there are surprises.

The Villager

A years worth of the very best!

People

A preponderance of intelligent, straightforward poems.

Booklist

Certainly it attests to poetrys continuing vitality.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A best anthology that really lives up to its title.

Chicago Tribune

An essential purchase.

The Washington Post

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OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES

John Ashbery, editor, The Best American Poetry 1988

Donald Hall, editor, The Best American Poetry 1989

Jorie Graham, editor, The Best American Poetry 1990

Mark Strand, editor, The Best American Poetry 1991

Charles Simic, editor, The Best American Poetry 1992

Louise Glck, editor, The Best American Poetry 1993

A. R. Ammons, editor, The Best American Poetry 1994

Richard Howard, editor, The Best American Poetry 1995

Adrienne Rich, editor, The Best American Poetry 1996

James Tate, editor, The Best American Poetry 1997

Harold Bloom, editor, The Best of the Best American Poetry 19881997

John Hollander, editor, The Best American Poetry 1998

Robert Bly, editor, The Best American Poetry 1999

Rita Dove, editor, The Best American Poetry 2000

Robert Hass, editor, The Best American Poetry 2001

Robert Creeley, editor, The Best American Poetry 2002

Yusef Komunyakaa, editor, The Best American Poetry 2003

Lyn Hejinian, editor, The Best American Poetry 2004

Paul Muldoon, editor, The Best American Poetry 2005

Billy Collins, editor, The Best American Poetry 2006

Heather McHugh, editor, The Best American Poetry 2007

Charles Wright, editor, The Best American Poetry 2008

David Wagoner, editor, The Best American Poetry 2009

Amy Gerstler, editor, The Best American Poetry 2010

Kevin Young, editor, The Best American Poetry 2011

Mark Doty, editor, The Best American Poetry 2012

Robert Pinsky, editor, The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition

Denise Duhamel, editor, The Best American Poetry 2013

Terrance Hayes, editor, The Best American Poetry 2014

Sherman Alexie, editor, The Best American Poetry 2015

Scribner Poetry

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2016 by David Lehman

Foreword copyright 2016 by David Lehman

Introduction copyright 2016 by Edward Hirsch

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

Jacket design by Jaya Miceli

Jacket Art Gabriel Vormstein, Sublime , 2007,

Various Tapes and Marker on Newspaper, 155 X 110 CM, Courtesy of Meyer Riegger

First Scribner edition September 2016

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Library of Congress Control Number: 88644281

ISBN 978-1-5011-2755-7

ISBN 978-1-5011-2756-4 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-5011-2757-1 (ebook)

David Lehman was born in New York City, the son of Holocaust survivors. Educated at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, he spent two years as a Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked as Lionel Trillings research assistant upon his return from England. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems (2013), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all from Scribner. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003), among other collections. Two prose books appeared in 2015: The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 19882014 (Pittsburgh), comprising the forewords he had written to date for The Best American Poetry , and Sinatras Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (HarperCollins). A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Schocken) won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2010. Lehman teaches in the graduate writing program of the New School and lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.

If our age is apocalyptic in moodand rife with doomsday scenarios, nuclear nightmares, religious fanatics, and suicidal terroriststhere may be no more chilling statement of our condition than William Butler Yeatss poem The Second Coming. Written in 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the epoch-ending disaster that was World War I, The Second Coming extrapolates a fearful vision from the moral anarchy of the present. The poem also, almost incidentally, serves as an introduction to the great Irish poets complex conception of history, which is cyclical, not linear. Things happen twice, the first time as sublime, the second time as horrifying, so that, instead of the second coming of the savior, Jesus Christ, Yeats envisages a monstrosity, a rough beast threatening violence commensurate with the human capacity for bloodletting.

Here is the poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere