Holiday books: poetry
November 28, 2010|By John McMurtrie
The Poets Laureate Anthology (W.W. Norton; 762 pages; $39.95). Poems by the country's 43 poets laureate have been assembled - for the first time - in one book.
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, by Kay
Ryan (Grove; 270 pages; $24). Wit enlivens much of the work by the former poet laureate.
A timely example: "Only a certain/ claque of beasts/
is part of the/ crèche racket/
... Anything more/ exotic
than/ a camel/ is out of luck/ this season."
The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press; 142 pages; $20 paperback). Kay Ryan is in this anthology as well, as are dozens of others who celebrate our surroundings.
The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems, by Robert Hass (Ecco; 352 pages; $34.99). An invaluable survey of the Bay Area poet's work, a lot of which is deeply rooted in the local landscape.
