J. D. McClatchy (1945–2018)

Lovely, heartbreaking, exquisite. I am, as I always am after Jarrell, reeling and half-blind.

"If just living can do this,
Living is more dangerous than anything."

and, of course:

"That the boy putting groceries in my car

see me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!"

With the exception of the final thirty pages of so (W.S. Merwin notwithstanding), a rather musty and fusty compilation of oceanic poesy. It's not the sea of Mary Oliver but more so "yo ho ho and a bottle of rum." The Ancient Mariner, indeed.

These are brilliant and insightful essays aimed at a professional, even academic, audience, rather than casual poetry lovers. The focus is primarily on major poets who came to prominence in the 1950s, with a definite preference for formalists. The pieces range from short, but substantial considerations of single aspects of a poet's work to longish surveys of entire careers. McClatchy's method, most often, is to discuss poems in some detail with substantial excerpts. I tended to find the show more essays on poets I am more familiar with, or sympathetic to, more helpful than those on poets less to my tastes. show less

A pretty high-powered anthology ("65 Outstanding Poets"); and while the selections are certainly impressive, I'm a bit perplexed just how Plath and Roethke (both d.1963) (...and Jarrell (d. 1965) and Berryman (d. 1972) and R.Lowell (d.1977) &c...) get included in a book of "Contemporary" poetry first published in 1990. "27 years ago" strikes me as a rather over-liberal definition of "Contemporary".