Will Schutt's first collection of poems ranges widely, touching here and there on the Pacific Coast, Italy, the Indian-named towns of Wisconsin and the Rhode Island outpost of its title--perhaps because he recognizes that
"Not everyone who dreams, dreams the beach.
For a while dead-ends are in vogue. For a while
open, uncharted cities...."

Westerly, the 2012 selection in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, reflects the work of a leisurely observer tripped up by the heartbreak and irony he sees, one who can say with the wisdom of an older poet: "We live so strangely, in love with visions,/ scared of the invisible."

Schutt's poems often find their way fleetingly to fatherhood and family, as in a translation of the Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti or an original poem like "American Window Dressing." Just as family bears a certain sadness, so, in "Louise's Story," a squirrel's "idiot dance up a tree" becomes more about the tired tree than the squirrel: "One sad-looking thing making another something happy./ Sometimes it's just us ruffling the leaves."

If Schutt's collection carries a tone of melancholy, it is tempered by an equal sense of possibility. The title poem leaves us in a place "where nirvana is a long time/ coming, or untidy, unresolved,/ the way stupid hope won't shut up." With eyes wide open but still "in love with visions," that is not a bad place to be. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Poet and critic James Longenbach mapped out some interesting territory in The Art of the Poetic Line, which he expands upon in The Virtues of Poetry. In its earliest uses, he writes, the word virtue "gestured toward a magical or transcendental power," and he wants to look at poems that aspire to boldness, doubt, excess, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise and worldliness. He seems to argue that paradox is at the heart of our best poems; they can go in two directions at the same time.

Longenbach's essays pay particular attention to the mechanics of poetry--down to the significance of stressed and unstressed syllables and the historical roots of words--as he makes the case that excellence in all kinds of poetry is fluid while at the same time exacting. Tennyson, we're told, had one of the "finest ears among poets," while Shakespeare is both "one of our greatest prose writers" and a useful tutor in writing badly. (Yeats and Pound also make frequent appearances.) Sometimes, Longenbach pairs poets to learn new things from the juxtaposition: Robert Lowell's and Elizabeth Bishop's letters to each other help explain what constitutes a confessional poem; Randall Jarrell is brought in to show us how John Ashbery is a poet both bold and shy.

In the end, Longenbach says, the origins of any poem are mysterious, but its virtues exist as the "material fact of language on the page." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Paul Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry was first published in 1994; the second edition of this massive anthology retains all the poets from that volume while adding new voices. But what is postmodern American poetry? In his perceptive introduction, Hoover tells us the term covers poetry from 1950 to the present that suggests "an experimental approach to composition" and a worldview that "sets itself apart from mainstream culture and the sentimentality and self-expressiveness of its life in writing." (Or, as novelist Geoff Nicholson once called it, "linguistic cage-fighting"--no holds-barred poetry.)

This impressive collection contains poems from the oral poetics of the Beats, performance poetries, the "writerly" poems of the New York School, language poetry, post-language lyrics, conceptual poetry, cyberpoetics,and proceduralism. Confused yet? Don't be. Much of this poetry plays with interpretations, encourages multiple readings, flips language upside down and welcomes new visual looks on the page.

Each of the poets gathered in this anthology is given an insightful and thoughtful short biography along with their poems. Hoover starts with a diverse pantheon of early masters--Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Frank O'Hara--leading up to more recent poets such as Ben Lerner, Noah Eli Gordon and Noelle Kocot. At the end are 15 essays that discuss postmodern poetics. Kudos to Hoover for pulling together a volume with hundreds of poems you won't encounter in your everyday reading. Essential. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Pacific Walkers is Nance Van Winckel's second collection chosen for the highly regarded Pacific Northwest Poetry Series (as was No Starling). In the first section, also called "Pacific Walkers," she gives voice to anonymous people whose stark obituaries--sex, approximate age, clothes, distinguishing marks--appear in the records of the Spokane County medical examiner's office. Here is "John Doe #130969," an adult male, approximately 60 years old, found along the railroad tracks, a tattoo of a name on his right forearm, unreadable:

"Because he'd brought nothing to unpack.
Because the house of this field
was so foreign, it embraced its resident."
At the opposite end of the spectrum, a female infant, only three or four months old, is found near a sewage treatment plant: "She wouldn't say if/ there'd been a beep, a siren,/ or a whisper."

Old photographs provide the source material for many of the poems in the second section. In "Stole," Van Winckel takes inspiration from a wedding photo of a young woman in 1911: "I lean past the question mark near her name/ and get the woodsmoke taste of her first kiss." Here, too, are poems about working as a newspaper reporter, being taken for a mannequin and, in "No Sign of My Passing," eating an apple, alone, on a "believed-to-be secret beach":

"And slice by slice, I ate an apple unsure
at the last about the center,
the polishing off even the stem
and the small black seeds."
Worlds, people, things--quietly, carefully observed. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

"Poetry does not tamper with the world," as William Carlos Williams wrote, "but moves it." Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street's rich and generous The Ecopoetry Anthology offers 320 poems by 208 poets--praising songs, incantations, lists, elegies, rhapsodies, jeremiads--each in their very different ways bearing the power "to break through our dulled disregard, our carelessness, our despair, reawakening our sense of the vitality and beauty of nature."

Part one presents poets, from Walt Whitman to Denise Levertov, who predate the environmental revolution. Next come 176 contemporaries, from A.R. Ammons to Robert Wrigley. It's apropos that the first poem in this middle section is Ammons's seminal piece, "Corson's Inlet," where he observes nature as he walks along his Jersey Shore dunes: "in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of/ primrose/ more or less dispersed."

Fisher-Wirth and Street have done a superb job of providing works by both well-known and lesser known poets. Alongside such luminaries as W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver, one can discover beautiful and moving pieces by Patrick Lawler, Davis McCombs or Annie Boutelle. Some readers may be disappointed at the absence of a favorite poem, but most of the "great" nature pieces of the modern era are here, including Galway Kinnell's overwhelming "The Bear," Robert Bly's moving prose poem "The Dead Seal" and Robert Hass's mini-epic "State of the Planet." Hass also provides a wise introduction, noting that The Ecopoetry Anthology reveals the ways our "nature poetry developed toward an ecopoetics, toward the necessity of imagining a livable earth." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Since 1988, David Lehman has chosen a celebrated American poet to select 75 poems for the annual Best of American Poetry anthology. To celebrate the series' 25th anniversary, he invited former poet laureate Robert Pinsky to choose 100 poems for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry. All lists necessarily reflect the personal taste and judgment of their compilers, but it takes special chutzpah and perspective to pick the poems that deserve to make the best cut twice--and Pinsky's fine collection proves that he's got the chops to do it.

It's hard not to nitpick the exclusion of one's personal favorites--where is Goldbarth, or Daniels, or Hudgins, or Kleinzahler, or Fairchild?--but it's more remarkable to read the broad selection of poems Pinsky has included. His selection is so rich and diverse one can't help but find several poems that will brighten any winter day. "The Opaque" by Mark Halliday is just one such discovery--a poem which is itself a kind of list of people, places, news, songs, even words that are opaque to real understanding yet are very real. We encounter them in a kind of global darkness, but, as the poem concludes:

How long is this tunnel?
Does it go somewhere? Oh, never mind,
here comes the light of day.

The Best of the Best American Poetry is a collection that never stops bringing light. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kansas.

The latest addition to Norton's estimable series of literary anthologies is long overdue. Angles of Ascent collects poems from 86 African American poets, all but three of whom hit their strides after 1960--luminaries of American verse like Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, Carl Phillips, Tracy K. Smith and Kevin Young.

In his introduction, Charles Henry Rowell (founder of Callaloo, The Journal of African Diaspora) characterizes modern African American poets as artists who have already assimilated the struggles of their predecessors--represented here by Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson--and, therefore, "do not place at the center of their poetry traditions associated with race and racial politics." The black experience is always somewhere in these more recent works from the "second and third wave" of African American poetry, but seldom overtly expressed in political terms--instead, we find Terrence Hayes's playful references to Fred Sanford in "What I Am," or the basketball metaphors of John Murillo's "Practicing Fade-Aways." And while many poems include cadences of blues and hip-hop rumbling beneath there colloquial narratives, Angles of Ascent also has room for Camille T. Dungy's astounding improvised sonnet sequence: "What to Eat, and What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison." Arriving as it does at the midpoint of the first black presidency, this anthology is a timely overview of contemporary African American poetry. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Kelly Davio's debut poetry collection, Burn This House, smolders with doubt and misdirection. Cosmic yet controlled, her poetry recalls Faulkner's Barn Burning, in which a son struggles against the crushing yet slippery burden of familial allegiance. Divided into five subsections that cycle from "Signs" through to "Judgment," Davio's poetry vibrates with ambiguity. In "Burned by Salt," Davio describes how a mother's sharp blow to a child's chest as she "braked for a red too quickly" could be protective instinct, or "from a darker place." In "Senescence," Cain, who is "no young man, [but] aged as first fathers are said to have lived," kills his brother not from "a lone flush of rage," but from years toiling in soil gouged by ravens and tracked by "worms that waited centuries for flesh." In "Chastity," Davio, like a Greek chorus, exposes the cruelty of Providence:
"The next Christmas, death came wrapped/ as a package, bowed with mangled steel."

Embracing paradox as the poet's deliverance, Davio evokes Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice Cream":
"Trace with bones
your semblance in the ash, and let darkness
surround, sloughing off the body's burden." 

At the same time, Davio's yearning for transcendence is grounded in her physical self. In "Gammelfleish," a cook's preparation of a stock pot symbolizes a poet's craft:
"Brown seeps from leaves,
bittering the stew, its odor like a small death
I wait for the slow color to spread,
for garlic tips to lose rough husks
with incremental heat at the pot, for
the alchemical swell of yellow to come." --Thuy Dinh, editor, Da Mau magazine

Alive at the Center is the first book in the ambitious Pacific Poetry Project of Portland State University's graduate publishing program. It includes a variety of poets from three cities--Vancouver, Seattle and Portland--chosen by nine editors (three from each city), themselves poets. As John Sibley Williams, who got the project off the ground, describes the process, "rounding up poets is like rounding up cats." Nevertheless, they did their jobs well, celebrating the vibrant poetic communities of their cities. "We have poetry stuffed in our parkas and stashed under our boot-soles," says Cody Walker, introducing the "rough water town" of Seattle; Portland's Susan Denning, adds, "It's Oregon, go ahead--mention the rain and the Doug firs and the fish and the rivers that run through it all."

The anthology is evenly balanced among the three cities, for a total of 136 poets. There are veteran poets here, like Heather McHugh, Floyd Skloot, Carlos Reyes, Paulann Petersen, Susan McCaslin and Evelyn Lau, side by side with rookies and other poets who may be relatively well known but are still at the early end of what might become long careers. And then there are the poems. So many good ones.

Richard Kenney's contribution, simply titled "Poetry," sums up the spirit of Alive at the Center, and is worth quoting in full:

Nobody at any rate reads it much. Your
lay
citizenry have other forms of fun.

Still, who would wish to live in a culture
of which future anthropologists would say:
Oddly, they had none?  --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

2013 is the centenary of African-American poet Robert Hayden's birth. Hayden, who once said he wanted to be a black poet "the way Yeats is an Irish poet," was the first African American to serve as poet laureate of the United States. He was born Asa Bundy Sheffey, but his mother, struggling in Detroit poverty, gave the infant boy to the Haydens; he never knew he was a foster child until he was 40. Slight and very poor of sight, he was ostracized by his classmates. At the University of Michigan, he studied with W. H. Auden, who gave him inspiration and direction as he moved away from his earlier radical socialist politics to pursue a poetry that Arnold Rampersand describes in an afterword to these Collected Poems as "saturated in nationalistic lore and love," while still maintaining his "independence of vision."

This collection highlights such stellar pieces as his powerful meditation on slavery, "Middle Passage":
A charnel stench, effluvium of living death
spreads outward from the hold
where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.
And "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz," his elegy on Malcolm X:
He fell upon his face before
Allah the raceless in whose blazing Oneness all
were one. He rose renewed renamed, became
much more than there was time for him to be. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher