[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.

[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.

[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

[John Whitworth]

Have you used up your supply, Michael. I came across Fenton too late in my life to make a single book a life-changing experience. When his books first came out I dismissed them unread because he was employed by the New Statesman. I hope I am wiser now.

[Michael F]

No, John, I still have one... I am going out of town for a few days, but when I get back I've resolved to go through Cummings -- to see if I can select one volume. It's time -- I haven't read him intensively in years. And I recall there were many of his poems I quite loved.

If no one beats me to him!

[John Whitworth]

Penguin did a selected which I possess, if that counts. It's how I discovered him. No, my teacher at school was how I discovered him. Thank you Mr Forsyth. Now Dr Forsyth I believe - a doctorate on Yeats.

[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.

[Nigel Mace]

I thought that I'd hold off putting in my second choice until we'd reached 50 - but impatient of the slow pace of contributions and partly stimulated by the discovery that names such as Auden were new to some - as have several American poets been to me - I have got to weaken

So... since I cannot enter MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle I must claim a place for John Betjeman's brilliantly crafted and magically, accurately evocative Summoned By Bells, which was not only conceived as a single book, but as an autobiography of his early years from childhood to his sending down from Oxford. I listened to his very first reading of the book on the Third Programme, night by night and chapter by chapter and sped to buy it from the old John Smith's bookshop in Glasgow as soon as it became available - the first hard-back book of new poetry of my own. It has never disappointed and phrases, lines and passages of it have rolled around in my consciousness ever since.

I suppose that for people not from the UK there will be resonances missing and reference points that will not strike quite the timbre in the mind and heart that they do here - but, for all that potential limitation set by his technique, the poem's slight catches of childhood, boyhood and youthful emotion and the anguish of family tensions which it brings to life will, I feel sure, stretch the Atlantic and further.

I am so tempted to offer a few quotations but having started on it, I have realised, swiftly, that once begun I would hardly be able to stop. If this wonderful work has passed you by, catch up with it now. There are plenty of copies on Abebooks from £500 odd for a signed copy to first editions with the dust jacket for 67pence plus postage from many places - but I loved finding it on offer from an outfit called Hemingway Ventures! Betjeman would have loved that.

Oh - and one quote is a must for this audience... Reproached by his furniture manufacturing father for his dilletante literary enthusiasms and urged to continue the firm, thereby "creating beauty" he responds...

"..... What is beauty?
Here where I write, the green Atlantic bursts
In cannonades of white along Pentire.
There's beauty here. There's beauty in the slate
And granite smoothed by centuries of sea,
And washed to life as rain and spray bring out
Contrasting strata higher up the cliff,
But none to me in polished wood and stone
Tortured by Father's craftsmen into shapes
To shine in Asprey's showrooms under glass,
A Maharajah's eyeful. For myself
I knew as soon as I could read and write
That I must be a poet. Even today,
When all the way from Cambridge comes a wind
To blow the lamps out every time they're lit,
I know that I must light mine up again."

Best to all,
Nigel