When I go to America on a conference or to visit my family, I try to get in a few hours in good bookshops catching up on American poetry. Spring 2001, a conference in Seattle allowed me to get to one of the few bookshops in the world dedicated soley to poetry, so I'm reading the books I bought there: the latest Merwin, two Anne Carson collections, an Emily Hiestand (Green the Witch-Hazel Wood), Linda Pastan's An Early Afterlife, Eleannor Wilner's Otherwise and Shenadoah and other verse plays by Delmore Schwarz. (The time before that, I discovered Virginia Hamilton Adair, and brought home her two collections, Ants on the Melon and Beliefs & Blasphemies.) Richard Price and I published In the Metaforest by Peter McCarey in Vennel Press recently, and preparing the new collection for publication sent me back to reread McCarey's Devil in the Driving Mirror, which we published a couple of years previously. And – of course – members of The Poetry Workshop.
North American: John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, Robert
Frost, Marilyn Hacker, John Hollander, Maxine Kumin, W.S. Merwin, Marianne Moore,
Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, Chase Twichell, Walt Whitman, Eleanor Wilner;
British: Auden, Michael Drayton, Carol Ann Duffy, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Ted Hughes, Edwin Morgan, Edwin Muir, Shakespeare, Yeats;
Non-English – in translation: Lorca, Neruda, and – most of
all – Rilke. Daniel Weissbort's recently published translation of Selected
Poems of Nikolay Zablotsky is exciting, especially the long poems
in the central section which includes the sincere poem about the glories of
collective agriculture which got Zablotsky into deep trouble when it was taken,
mistakenly, as satire.