By all means, Andrew, put in something by Celan officially. I thought about it, but I don't feel competent to explain or discuss him. (Does anybody?)

I feel the same way about Neruda. I keep thinking Canto General should be in a list of best books of the 20th century, but I'd rather have someone who reads Spanish and knows Spanish-language poetry make that call. I know Neruda, like Celan, only a little and mostly in English (though I can pick through Celan's German a little).

Now if I can just decide how I feel about Geoffrey Hill, who does write in English, just an English hardly anyone understands...

Pat

I think Conrad Aiken's Preludes and Tristan Tzara's Absolute Man belong on the list, but I don't have my copies handy and so can't extemporize at the moment.

Nemo

This was not an "official" criterion for nominations, although I think a lot of us wanted to find books that met this standard, that our selections be good as books. I'm struck by how difficult this was to achieve, how rarely this ideal is reached. Even the Frost selections I recall being chosen for which individual poems they contained. Frost certainly wrote books that have gems mixed in with lesser ores.

Somehow we need the poems to cooperate in the effect they produce as a group, though some tend to stand out as greater than others, just as within a single poem particular lines or phrases stand out, but we still want the poem to do something taken as a whole. (Nicholson Baker's anthologist, I recall, imagines going in the opposite direction, collecting single words from poems he loves.)

Anyway, food for thought. I can think of books that achieve Frost's ideal, but now I'm not sure if it's truly so rare, or if it's that I read books much differently than I read poems...

Pat

That's the way I was viewing my choices, Patrick, although the end result was usually thus book length poems. I think a poet who was very good at molding his 'collections' is Thom Gunn: each of his books seems to me to have a distinct shape.

Nemo

[i]Hi All,

First off, Barbara, would you please edit your post to make your choice # 73, not 72? That'll help the math.

Second, ,Nigel asks:

- I don't think this point was covered in your original - or revised - 'rules' for this thread, but is it really intended that there should be more than one book of any given poet on the list? Rilke is now in twice and Phillip's last choice is trailing the notion of additional Eliot.. where would this stop? I feel that the spirit of the original, which was about individual books of poetry, is already getting lost with a number of 'collecteds/completes/selecteds' and it is going to be further diluted by adding extra items from well-known 'big' names - with the door now also apparently open to any language in translation. It's your thread so can we have a 'ruling' please?

My feeling is that rules, like rulers, are made to be overthrown when they oppress. If the Spanish king is off in Africa secretly poaching endangered elephants, do away with the silly notion of royalty and let the silly royals go get a job like the rest of us. The same applies to my rules: if a poet is so terrific at crafting books that he or she MUST be in twice, so be it. If a poet in translation is so amazing that the damage the poem suffers in transmission isn't enough to keep him or her from the list, so be it.

I will say that, yes, this thread is meant to highlight great books of poetry, not great poets who perhaps never wrote a great, unified, amazing book (as compared to some wonderful poems thrown in with lots of bathos and junk, so you have to pick the good stuff out of the mess).

Thanks, TB

Great thread, Tony. 'Been enjoying it!

In defense of those who suggested 5 titles, though, you're actually the one who set the limit at 5. (See post 101, top of page 11.)

But who's counting?

Best, Bruce

Hi Brian,

My brain is getting very leaky, obviously! Okay, five it is. I'll revise my earlier post to stave off confusion.

Thanks, TB

I hope someone will post Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate!

73. The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
 

All right then.

Because it re-opened the field for narrative poetry. Because it works as a novel, as a poem, as a meditation on life, on love, on death, on San Francisco, on wine, on animals... Because the metre and rhymes are handled so with such deftness and lightness. Because I have read it countless times and always found new things to enjoy in it...

Thanks, Gregory. Now I have to reread it!

PS. That is #74.