David Berman -- lead singer and songwriter for The Silver Jews -- writes lilting, funny poems steeped in Americana from the Deep South. His air is thick and humid, a smoky, wry wit. There is dialogue here, too; punchy conversational notes between himself and reader, not marked but inserted casually - archetypes as quirk, sewn together by a narrative thread celebrating life. Exquisite. - Grant

If there are books to read, books to study, and books to live with, then Helen Vendler's Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form belongs to the latter two categories. It is nothing short of an education and, like all good educations, demands a lot from its student. The primary reason is Yeats himself. He is a brilliant but often difficult poet, reveling in a density of expression and meaning that naturally lends itself to contemplation but can appear inaccessible at first reading. It takes a patient and skillful if not brilliant guide to tease out the intricacies of his profound poetic imagination. And fortunately for us, Helen Vendler is all of these and then some. For it is Yeat's previously overlooked use of form - how he constructs a poem internally through rhythm and meter and externally through stanza shape, line lengths, and use of tradional lyric structures - that is the primary subject and field insight for her work. The result is one revelation after another. - Colin

This updated edition of Thirsting For Peace in a Raging Century, which won the National Book Award in 1988, is a masterpiece of expansive writing. While Edward Sanders is (rightfully) celebrated as a counterculture hero, he's much more than that - his background in the classics gives his writing some of the epic weight of Homer and Virgil, and his explorations into ancient Egyptian culture allow him to draw some striking, and surprisingly effortless, parallels between 1960 BC and 1960 AD. The poems draw from a vast stable of characters and scenes: Ginsberg, Olson, Pound, Wordsworth, Sappho, and Plato, along with Nixon, Charles Manson, angry pharaohs, drug dealers, crooked cops, poetry readings, plane rides, Egyptian death-boats, psilocybin trips, obscene trysts both real and fantasized, and nearly everything else under the sun. For an example of Sanders' range, start with "Sappho on East Seventh" - it's one of my favorite poems of all time. -- John Peck

I'm not a flowery verse kind of gal. When this book first arrived, I gravitated to it, perhaps because of the simple cover, the title's opening line in red that sets it apart from the poems' blue body. I opened it and began to read, not stopping until I finished all 100 poems. Pavlova's bare bones verse is raw, honest and straight to the point. She has a way of capturing those fleeting moments that allows the reader to linger, and the luxury to recall memories. -- Cheryl Ryan

Imagine asking two poets in your personal pantheon to select their favorite poems for an anthology - no limit to number, no balance as to type or theme, the sole criterion being poems they love. What makes this anthology unique (and in print since 1982) is not just the stellar poets who chose the poems but also their method. In the introduction, Heaney describes this collection as having amassed itself like a cairn, picked up one by one and left in situ without much thought given to the poems already in the pile. To preserve its special serendipity, the poems are presented in order of first line, not artificially grouped. The Rattle Bag is the ultimate desert island collection and one I return to year after year. -- Margaret Simpson

Archy is a cockroach poet. Mehitabel is an alley cat who claims to have been Cleopatra in a previous life. Don Marquis is the writer who put these two oddball characters together for a truly unique and eccentric poetry experience. Archy and Mehitabel is made up of philosophical musings, misanthropic epithets, and even some ironic commentary on animal cruelty, all told through the free verse poetry of a cockroach jumping on the keys of Marquis's typewriter. Immensely entertaining with spectacular and unexpected moments of profundity, Archy and Mehitabel is an obscure poetic classic that should no longer be overlooked. -- Geo Ong

Joseph Lease's Broken World is a lament, a jazz melody, an explanation of how the world (both personal and political) ends. These poems keenly, delicately explore all that is no longer here and never-was-but-should-have-been. Lease's lines are formally austere, using the page and caesura to evoke the space needed for the ideas he presents. These poems exercise a vulnerable, wry negative-awareness that nonetheless accepts us, not in spite of, but rather exactly for everything we lack as individuals and as a nation. "The elegies are taking off their clothes--" (p. 39): indeed they are, and with such abandon. -- Trevor Calvert

My first encounter with David Hinton was a slim volume of poetry entitled The Selected Poems of Li Po. The translations felt fresh and alive and I read and re-read that book many times. For me, it was the language that I kept going back for - or, really, the not-language. Paired with the concise and vivid nature of Chinese poetry, Hinton's use of space and his attention to sound allows the mystery in each image a chance to blossom, and I say a chance because the poems never feel finished, they continue to grow and unfurl with each new read. This newest anthology, Classical Chinese Poetry, is just as wonderful. Hinton includes selections from all the early classics (The Book of Songs, Tao Te Ching, Songs of Ch'u, and a large selection of Tang poetry) but also gives his readers a chance to visit other folk-song collections and versions of poems which I personally had never seen before, including a wonderful series of seasonal poems by Lady Midnight. Aside from beautiful translations, the reader also gets many historical aids, in-depth notes and a large reference for future reading. Any fan of Chinese poetry, history, poetics or poetry in general should take a look at this wonderful collection. It is a beautiful edition and one I will pull from my shelf again and again over the years. -- Sean Mix

In his recent book of poetry, Sight Map, Brian Teare embraces the role of lead cartographer. Writing with confidence and precision, he charts the manifold connections between a gritty yet graceful material world and its mystical counterpart. We quickly discover that the poet's perceptions of flora and fauna, of lovers lost and found, of cityscapes, fields and cosmos are all beautifully intertwined. The book's lush, powerful, and wide-reaching vocabulary further blurs the boundaries between nature, sex, philosophy, and prayer. These poems are daring and lyrically complex, and Teare employs a variety of exquisite forms. Each page delivers a carefully crafted meditation that reminds readers of the many ways language can seduce and comfort and challenge us. -- Steffi Drewes