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New Bottles
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan. New York: Grove Press. $24.00 (cloth). New & Selected Poems: 1955 to 2010 by Robert Dana. Tallahassee: Anhinga Press. $35.00 (cloth). Bone-Songs and Sanctuaries: New and Selected Poems by Michael Jennings. Riverdale-on-Hudson: The Sheep Meadow Press. $15.95 (paper). The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems by Edward Hirsch. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $27.00 (cloth).
JUST AS A GOOD POEM COLLAPSES immensities of feeUng or experience into a small space, a devotion to reading and writing poetry condenses time. Poets you consider your contemporaries, whose first books you recall reading with varying combinations of admiration and envy, suddenly stare out from their dust jackets with weathered faces, their laurels now a wreath of white hair, and you realize with a shock that all of you have sixty or more winters on your heads. Suddenly you hold in your hands the poet's "new and selected," where work from that first book, some of it still vivid in your memory, no longer marks the adventurous uncertainty of setting forth, but a first firm step toward a destination the poet continues to pursue and continually redefines.
In recent decades the new and selected volume has evolved into a shape as rigid as a bottle's, into which the poet has decanted the best or most representative of a career's worth of work. The shoulders may slope or ride high, the punt may vary in its depth, but our method of tasting remains constant: We uncork it and first sample the new poems, whose familiarity might bring comfort, or whose novelty might strike our palates as strange. Then, as the poetry breathes, we leap back in time to early pressings, proceeding chronologically, book by book, through the poems the poet has selected as those UkeUest to age most gracefully and enduringly, from youthful fruitiness to mature complexity. The analogy ends, of course, when we finish the selection, since we can lay the volume back down in the rack for cellaring until we wish to sample it anew, curious how renewed acquaintance will color our enjoyment of the cru while we anticipate vintages still awaiting the press.
Recent months have yielded several notable new and selecteds, with volumes...