[John Whitworth]

At the far end of the enormous room
An orchestra is playing for the rich.

Magpie Auden at it again. But what a couplet!

[Bruce McBirney]

In the mid-1980’s, there were few folks under 40 years of age writing metrical poetry, doing it well, and getting away with it—certainly not here in California. Timothy Steele's Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (a strong follow-up to his 1979 first book Uncertainties and Rest) and Vikram Seth’s verse novel The Golden Gate, both published in 1986, showed that there was a bright future and a way forward (outside pop music) for writing that included meter and rhyme as part of the sound system. (Seth found a sympathetic advisor and friend in Steele early in his writing career and dedicated The Golden Gate to Steele, who returned the compliment. Steele’s dedication of Sapphics to Seth is a tetrameter sonnet in the same form as all the stanzas in Seth’s book.)

Beyond its importance to metrical poetry in the late 20th century, Sapphics not only includes individual poems worthy of the anthologies (the wise title poem “Sapphics Against Anger,” the sparkling love lyric “An Aubade,” a sonnet “The Skimming Stone” about a friend who died prematurely), but also holds together as a unified whole with recurring themes. The last line of Steele’s prior book Uncertainties ended with a focus on the immediate present—“Right now. Right here.” In Sapphics, whether describing everyday scenes of life in L.A., or reflecting on artistic and literary sources as diverse as David Copperfield and Last Tango in Paris, Steele keeps returning to a quiet appreciation of the present moment, and to the ways in which preoccupation with past losses or the “chartering of hopes” for an unrealistic future can sidetrack that.

Here’s a link to Amazon’s page for this book, reprinted in one volume with Uncertainties and Rest under the joint title Sapphics and Uncertainties.

http://www.amazon.com/Sapphics-uncer...+uncertainties

There’s a link on the same web page to Steele’s later book Toward the Winter Solstice--his finest book, I think--but it falls outside Tony’s parameters for this “20th Century” list, since it was published in 2006. However, Winter Solstice includes a host of vivid and varied poems and will surely merit a place on the list of best ”21st Century” poetry books, when we (or someone else) gets to that.

Best, Bruce

[David Rosenthal]

Good pick, Bruce. Even as late as the mid 1990s, finding Sapphics and Uncertainties -- the reissued double volume -- in the bookstore was a meaningful event for me. I'd have put Toward the Winter Solstice in myself, but as you said it came after the century ended. I considered both The Color Wheel and S & U, but I think you made the right pick.

By the way, my other pick would have been E. A. Robinson's Children of the Night but it was published before the century began. And here we are 31 titles in and still no Robinson. I think Frank Osen suggested a selected back in the thread somewhere. Anyone...?

David R.

[Bill Carpenter]

Yes, thanks for the Tim Steele nomination. Take a look at James Matthew Wilson's remarkable, far-reaching Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction, published earlier this year by Story Line Press.

[Bruce McBirney]

Bill, I'm not familiar with the book you mentioned on Steele, but I'll look for it.

David, I agree that The Color Wheel is a fine collection, too, with some memorable poems ("Eros," "Walking Her Home," "Woman in a Museum," etc.) And you're right that Robinson should be on the list. (And, I think, Jeffers, Dylan Thomas, Houseman, and even Bob Dylan, though he famously said he wasn't a poet, but more of a trapeze artist.) But for my second pick, I'm thinking of another Californian.

[Bruce McBirney]

Many of the books on this list achieve their effects by indirection and reserve, veiled meanings and metaphors. Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me (published in 2000, just under the wire for a “20th Century” list) is a good reminder that sometimes the best way to say something is to come right out and say it--especially if you can say it so well and with such burning immediacy.

Some of the most arresting poems in Tell Me (“Glass,” “Collapsing Poem,” "The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of Revision”) derive their power from the voice of an initially “objective” narrator who gradually is drawn into the poem’s situation and starts to lose control…and then pulls the reader in, too. But the poet herself never loses control of the material. This stuff is really hard to pull off convincingly, requiring craft both in phrasing and in walking an emotional tightrope. But Addonizio does it repeatedly.

There is a wide range of subject matter in Tell Me (often presented with an honesty that can shock, but not for the sake of shocking), all grounded in things real people care about—too many problems and too much drink (“Glass”); the world’s maddening and eerie mixture of evil with beauty (“Theodicy”); a mother and daughter, both prone to depression, making a non-suicide pact (“The Promise”); the wish that death will “pass over” a loved one (“Prayer”); the very human yearning to feel and experience life fully, and damn the consequences (“For Desire”); a lyrical imagining of long-ago lives, triggered during a walk by the ocean (“At Moss Beach”).

A great book.

Here’s a link to the Amazon page for Tell Me:

http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Me-Americ...ywords=tell+me

Best, Bruce

[David Rosenthal]

Bruce -- I haven't in the past been much of a fan of Addonizio's poems. Maybe I'll give her another day in court with this book. That is one of the good things about a thread like this.

David R.

[William A. Baurle]

Yes, Robinson definitely belongs on the list. I'm hoping someone'll nominate Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, J.C. Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, all hugely important; as well as Spender, Empson, and MacNeice, across the pond.

And Edgar Lee Masters. His Spoon River Anthology was all in free verse, but he wrote a lot of fine verse in traditional forms. Very under-read and underrated.

[John Whitworth]

Spender? Spener is an overrated twit. Name a single good poem the old fool wrote. Empson and MacNeice Yes, sure. But Sir Stephen Spender? A comic figure. Roy Campbell supposedly hung him out of a window and Campbell was quite right. And a much better poet to boot,

[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

Spender? Spener is an overrated twit. Name a single good poem the old fool wrote. Empson and MacNeice Yes, sure. But Sir Stephen Spender? A comic figure. Roy Campbell supposedly hung him out of a window and Campbell was quite right. And a much better poet to boot,

No offense, John, but Spender was a very fine poet.