Book of the Year: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson (Modern Library).This one is unavoidable. You can’t get around it. You have to go through it. 2007 was a very good year for Auden’s readers. Mendelson’s collection was welcomed with open arms on both sides of the Atlantic. Timed to coincide with the centenary of Auden’s birth, it received wide attention and sent many back to school under the tutelage of the rumpled, incredibly prolific, and always loveable man who may be remembered as the greatest English-born poet of the century.***Best Book of Contemporary Poetry: Ludlow by David Mason (Red Hen Press).The book-length poem has been a very risky venture in the last century. Few efforts can be counted as successes [...]

 Book of the Year: Not for Specialists: New & Selected Poems by W. D. Snodgrass (BOA Editions).What happened to Snodgrass? After winning the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for his first book, the “confessional school” landmark Heart’s Needle, his career stalled. As William Logan has written, among living poets “none has suffered so peculiar a history of publication” as has Snodgrass. This is a welcome selected, then, for one of the most significant post-war American poets, his first since the 1991 Selected Poems from SoHo Press. Runner-Up: Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).A very popular and sometimes controversial book. New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn’s selection of previously unpublished, and in many cases uncompleted, poems [...]

  Book of the Year: The Collected Poems (1943-2004) of Richard Wilbur (Harcourt)Runners-Up: Safest by Michael Donaghy (Picador)Who is the greatest living American poet? While Anthony Hecht lived, one could debate the question. Now, the matter is beyond dispute: Wilbur really is our “king of the cats.” What’s more, not since Robert Lowell has a poet written so many good poems to accompany his great ones. As for Donaghy, who died last year, here is one last book from that rarest of exiles: an American much admired in London and Dublin.***Best Book of Contemporary Poetry: Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems (Library of America)Runners-Up: The Niagara River by Kay Ryan (Grove Press). Scenes from Comus by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin UK).Who is Samuel Menashe? The last of [...]

 Book of the Year: The Collected Poems of Donald Justice (Knopf)Runner-Up: Second Space by Czeslaw Milosz (Ecco). Inner Voices: Selected Poems by Richard Howard (FSG).Granted, this is not a daring choice. Donald Justice was beloved as a poet and teacher by several generations of American poets. Still, we’ll leave it to other award committees to prefer Jean Valentine over Justice. Sometimes the consensus opinion is also the right one. ***Best Book of Contemporary Poetry: The Prodigal by Derek Walcott (FSG).Runner-Up: Brother Fire: Poems by W. S. Di Piero (Knopf).What was the best book by a living author this year? Derek Walcott’s travelogue was so gorgeous that it reminded his contemporary American counterparts how far from beauty their lines have strayed. ***Best Translations: The Poetry of Petrarch, translated [...]

Book of the Year: The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (FSG)Runners-Up: The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes, edited by Paul Keegan (FSG); “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate (FSG)The story of the year was summed up in two words: Robert Lowell. Nearly three decades after his death, David Gewanter and Frank Bidart finally released the massive Collected Poems (1181 pages) to massive acclaim, and still managed to leave it incomplete. Yet this book leaves no doubt, now, that Lowell stands with Pound and Eliot and Yeats. By comparison, a mere five years after the passing of Ted Hughes, Paul Keegan amassed the 1333 pages of his Collected. We shall see if Hughes [...]