[Michael F]

I also agree on Cummings. I have only his selected, and his collected (which I don't know as well as I should), so I can’t single out a volume. I’d add the he is one of the best poets of sensuality that I have read. I think he must have been something in the sack…

And “Since Feeling is First” is one of my very favorite poems, anywhere, anytime.

So where is Fenton? I think John W. should get a pass, and be able to select THREE.

[David Rosenthal]

Meanwhile, Robinson isn't officially on the list yet either. Frank, why don't you add the Mezey edition...

David R.

[John Riley]

I'm surprised the list has made it this far without Wilbur? I've read relatively little and have been waiting for some recommendations.

[John Riley]

This is a collected but it's thin and her poetry is so consistent in both theme and style it has more the feel of a single volume. It can be said that over her career her work changes too little for her to be considered a major or important poet. That's a question for the critics who know more than I do. I like it that you can open this book up at random and find poems such as "Statue and Birds" and "Medusa" and "Night."

Night

The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Estuaries...stuaries+bogan

[William A. Baurle]

Thanks for that link, John. I "looked inside" and the poem, Sub Contra, really struck me. I've read Bogan only in anthologies, but I think I may have to get one of her books. Maybe this one.

Lors bless the internets!

[David Rosenthal]

Good call on Blue Estuaries. Bogan is on the shortlist of those deserving of much more attention than they get, IMO.

David R.

[Chiago Mapocho]

While there are two other poets I would like to nominate, sadly enough it seems the books were published after 2000 (Hart Crane's The Complete Poems [Centennial Edition] and Sylvia Plath's Ariel: The Restored Edition).

Instead, I nominate Edgar Bowers' Collected Poems [1999], the book that changed my high-school-stereotyped view of poetry to something else than merely romantic drivel. At this point, I viewed prose as the epitome of creative writing; the poetry I had encountered thus far was, to sum it up, so bad the bad looked freakishly good. I remember thinking, what can poetry possibly have to offer, when even its supposed strong points like metaphors and imagery couldn't compare to what I'd read in novels like As in Heaven (Niall Williams) and Gilead (Marilynne Robinson) - granted, both spectacular novels.

Then, the last year of high-school, we had a poetry-month where we could choose our own poet to analyse. Long story short, I picked Edgar Bowers' Collected Poems, and it opened my eyes to poetry. This was so far from the poems in our standard text books: no ridiculous rhymes, strained syntax, irreparable images. The formal control he showed, the startling images, the syntax that danced across the lines unrestrained from linebreak or rhymes -- I didn't know all the reasons back then, but it affected me like only good poetry can. In the best cases, it was the collage of rhyme, meter, images, linebreak, sonics, diction, syntax and content fitting together in such a way there could be no other way.

One of his strongest gifts, and perhaps most overlooked, was his ability to achieve subtle contrast. His poems were almost always compact in composition: you could get the feeling the idea inside their form was like money inside a safe - locked away. But, the imagination the poems held within their confinement of form and meticulous choice of diction and imagery, was in no way confined, but somehow the freer for it, somehow clearer, preciser. Somehow, within the walls of form, imagination found its anchor-point, and an aim. That's one of the hardest things to do, not letting form hinder imagination, but rather become a vessel for it.

The same contrast can be found in his formal control and the intense feelings he deals with (often loss). One would think the spareness / conciseness of thought and diction would weaken the emotions, but instead it sets a backdrop that accentuates the raw feelings he tackles in his poems (An Afternoon at the Beach, for instance), the unrefined nature of emotions, sensations and feelings contrasting brilliantly with the refinement of his craft.




With poems such as An Afternoon at the Beach, The Mountain Cemetary and the masterpiece The Astronomers of Mont Blanc, to name a few, I think this collection deserves a place in the top 100.

Link to book: http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poem...s=edgar+bowers

Because I don't know how familiar you are with him, here's a few links to the aforementioned poems:
http://unitproj.library.ucla.edu/spe...tronomers.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171962
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...ine/poem/18063

[Bill Carpenter]

What a delightful exercise! What a feeling of fraternity one gets from this sharing of strong impressions! I might almost have forgotten those taken from The Branch will not Break and The Dream Songs, and second those nominations. And Four Quartets, and the wheat in Pound, which is plentiful. The rules of the game pose some difficulties. No doubt most contemporary readers came to Stevens through The Palm at the End of Mind, a selected-collected. And Richard Wilbur has been readily available in collections at least since the seventies, so those collections would belong on the list if they were allowed. If anyone is looking for a Wilbur recommendation, there is a recent Collected.

Yet there is a rabbit-bird gestalt to the game, because in addition to discovered kingdoms of shared loves, I find there are considerable territories that mean relatively little to me, which it feels heretical to admit, Auden and Bishop, for example.

For no. 25, I nominate Frank Stanford's the battlefield where the moon says I love you (1977). It is the Great American (Long) Poem of the 20th century, finishing lengths ahead of its competitors in the field, Gunslinger, Sandover, Cantos, though Fred Turner's marvelous sci-fi epics come closer. battlefield is a 15,000- line lyric-epic-dream vision set in 1960 Memphis-Arkansas-Mississippi, an inspired free-verse folk-surrealist tome that realizes Whitman's prophecy of the future poem of "Death and these States," a national poem of intimate curses and blessings. Besides Amazon, available at: http://lostroads.org/battlefield.html

For no. 26, Fitzgerald's Odyssey, which I think was formative in providing a model of modern American in meter. It used to be taught to ninth graders in the California public schools -- thank you, Mrs. Rich!

Thanks, Tony!

[William A. Baurle]

Absolute agreement on Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey. Magnificent effort. I've kept my Vintage soft-cover edition of that work on my bedside table for over ten years. If I could do something like that I would feel like I'd done something truly lasting and important in the world of letters. And to think, probably the most revered translation of all, from another tongue into English anyway, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, was by another Fitzgerald, Edward FitzGerald. For the longest time I thought of the two individuals as one person.

Let's not forget Robert Fitzgerald's own poems, which were often brilliant.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-fitzgerald#

**Edit: I've used my two but I hope someone will eventually nominate a book by e.e. cummings.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Since we get to post two for the list, if we really really have to, here's mine. It is Edwin Muir’s best, published (in 1956) near the end of his life—he was one of those poets who got better the older he got. Muir is one of the rare poets who had a truly mythic imagination—nothing contrived about it, he just had it. Read his stunningly human and beautiful Autobiography for his account of how he came to experience it and express it. One Foot in Eden is like a Muir greatest hits: besides the title poem, it has his great poem on the Annunciation, which is like Fra Angelico put into verse; and also “The Animals” (“All is new and near / In the unchanging Here”); “Milton” (“There towards the end he to the dark tower came / Set square in the gate, a mass of blackened stone / Crowned with vermilion fiends like streamers blown / From a great funnel filled with roaring flame”); and greatest of all, his masterly “Horses,” which Eliot called “that great, that terrifying poem of the atomic age.” This for me is one of those books of poems that always stays with you and that you always return to. We had a good thread on Muir a long time back, with some of his poems posted—including “The Animals” and “The Horses,” started by Alicia Stallings.

This single volume isn't in print any more, but the best collected poems of Muir is edited by Peter Butter. Unfortunately it's rather expensive, so if you want to check it out go for the old Faber Collected Poems, which was reissued in 2003.