[Nigel Mace]

Susan - Thank you for this one, (Stallings' "Archaic Smile") quite unknown to me and, on a first sample, also quite marvellous.

[Michael F]

Susan,

I am so glad (but not surprised) that you “discovered” Szymborska, and gratified that you voiced your appreciation!

I think you are right on Stallings: IMO, she has rare grace and polish to her writing, and striking deftness -- oh, magic -- with metaphor. As with Szymborska, I felt something of Melville’s “shock of recognition” when I first read Archaic Smile.

Like others, I am sifting through a pile of books from this thread, happily, and humming…

[Bruce McBirney]

There hasn’t been any activity on this thread for a few days, and it looks like it’s finally winding down after quite a run! Since we’re still about 20 short of Tony’s stated goal of 100 books, I’ll use another of my allotted picks, though I hadn’t planned to.

It seems to me that two books not yet listed, though they’ve both been alluded to in the thread, cast a longer shadow over 20th-century poetry in English than any others—North of Boston and The Wasteland. (The Wasteland, though just a single poem, was brought out as a stand-alone book after its initial magazine publication.) So much of what has been written afterwards has been an attempt to emulate, or a violent reaction against, one or the other of these two disparate masterpieces that it seems impossible to ignore them. And while my own favorite individual books of Frost and Eliot are probably New Hampshire and Four Quartets, these two still amaze me as well. (I'll pick the Frost here, and leave Eliot to someone else.)

North of Boston contains the best blank verse from the first 40 years of Frost’s life. Most of his best lyric verse to that point (other than a couple that he included in North of Boston) appeared separately a year earlier in his first published book, the more uneven A Boy’s Will. Some of the best poems from North of Boston have been included in the anthologies for decades, such as “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” and “After Apple Picking.” But the book also has various other poems that are well worth a second look, including “The Black Cottage” (one of my personal Frost favorites), “A Servant to Servants,” “The Wood Pile,” and the lovely “Good Hours,” which concludes the book.

I don’t have any qualms about North of Boston being the third Frost title on this list. (Others have already suggested Mountain Interval and New Hampshire, both excellent choices.) In fact, if I could pick only one book of 20th Century poetry that has more poems I’ve enjoyed and come back to over and over again, it would be one version or another of Frost’s complete or collected poems, since even Frost’s last volumes, though more uneven, all have poems I wouldn’t want to do without. But I gather the spirit of this list is to favor single volumes that hang best together as a book. North of Boston does that and, along with its companion volume A Boy’s Will, may have been more influential than any others.

[Bruce McBirney]

Julia Alvarez is probably best known for her novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, Yo! (my favorite of her novels), and In the Name of Salome (a fine novel about a poet). But she was a poet before she was a novelist, and The Other Side/El Otro Lado is a memorable and moving poetry collection.

Many of the poems here are about being stretched between and enriched by two languages, two cultures, and family in two countries. But the poems span a variety of topics—the childhood loss of a beloved housekeeper who sang while working, but left suddenly one day with no goodbye (“The Gladys Poems”); the lovely but painful arc of a middle-aged romance that didn’t last (“The Joe Poems,” highlighted by the “The Last Love Story,” recounting the narrator's hopeful acceptance of her lover's struggle to let go of a prior lost relationship--as lovely a poem about love as I can recall); and the return as an adult to a childhood homeland that was left behind suddenly many years before (the long title sequence “The Other Side/El Otro Lado”).

Here is a link to a page with more information on this book (and Julia Alvarez’s other poetry books): http://www.juliaalvarez.com/poetry I think there are also links on that page to Amazon’s sales page for each book.

[Andrew Sofer]

Ted Hughes' THE EARTH OWL AND OTHER MOON PEOPLE? Admittedly a book of poems for children, but one that inspired a generation of British poets born in the 1960s to become poets.

[Alder Ellis]

I just have Grace Schulman's big collection of 2003, "The Poems of Marianne Moore." I don't know what the collections were during her life, but 2 of my favorites, "Marriage" and "An Octopus," are from the early 20s, & so maybe in the same collection. That would be my nomination for her.

& this I think would be the most scandalous omission up to here for an Anglophone top 100 list. Moore survives to a too great degree in that clever line about imaginary gardens with real toads in them. And "I, too, dislike it" -- from the same poem -- admittedly, well aimed. After all, isn't poetry, from a certain point of view, detestable? Moore got that, which is a wonderful thing about her. Her poems are smart & difficult. You can't just read them, she forces you either to live with them or to leave them, to make that choice. I'm just an amateur, a novice, in her curious world, but have seen enough to be convinced of its value.

[Alder Ellis]

I have the "Collected Poems" of 2004, in the TOC of which I see 3 of my favorites -- "Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy," "Men at Forty," & "The Tourist from Syracuse" -- listed under Night Light (1967).

All 3 appear in this thread:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...donald+justice

One thing about "Men at Forty" is that its title quotes a phrase from Wallace Stevens' "Le Monocle de mon Oncle." The contrast of sensibilities is, on the latecomer Justice's part, exquisitely knowing.

Justice was mainly a formalist but made significant ventures in free verse & in the halfway-house of syllabics ("Men at Forty" is free verse, "The Tourist from Syracuse" syllabics). He took nothing for granted, always played at the edges. You wouldn't say, based on Justice's practice, that formalism is the way to go. It doesn't come down that way, predetermined. It comes down with its eyes open.