Contemporary American Poetry

Of the five books reviewed here, one explicitly sets out to make a dramatic impact upon what we think of as the canon of contemporary poetry: Harold Bloom's edited anthology, The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997. This is an anthology culled from the first 10 volumes of The Best American Poetry series, whose general editor has been David Lehman. In the present anthology's foreword Lehman writes, "If the books in the series have lived up to their collective title, this anthology of anthologies might define a contemporary canon" (1 1). This is all the more reason, thinks Lehman, for asking Bloom to edit the volume, for he is "the one critic who has unabashedly and unapologetically committed himself to the idea of a literary canon, to the possibility of making one and to the necessity of having one, is a critic who long ago made a name for himself as a highly discriminating reader of the poetry of his time, whose provocative judgments have turned out often remarkably often to be right" (1 1). Neither the editor of the other anthology, The New Young American Poets: An Anthology, nor the authors of the three critical books are prepared to make such brash claims. Nevertheless, they each set out to say, in their more subtle ways, something with regard to which contemporary poets merit our attention. As they do so, they are participating in the same canonical discussion that Lehman and Bloom think themselves in control of. They are each seeking to promote not only a set group of poets but also a poetics, and the consequences of each attempt are not restricted to the poets who are brought to the fore. In Private Poets, Worldly Acts: Public and Private History in Contemporary American Poetry, Kevin Stein sets out to study a select group of late-twentieth-century American poets Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Frank O'Hara, James Wright, Philip Levine, Yusek Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, David Wojahn, and Carolyn Forche "who have labored under the remnants of a Modernist tradition that encouraged them to turn their backs on larger historical forces," yet who have gone on to evince "an awareness of