The Best American Poetry 2006: Series Editor David Lehman

Billy Collins

Simon and Schuster, Jun 17, 2008 - Poetry - 224 pages

"So welcome, readers, to a plurality of poets, a cornucopia of tropes, and a range of interests."

-- From Billy Collins's introduction

The Best American Poetry series offers a distinguished poet's selection of poems published in the course of a year. The guest editor for 2006 is Billy Collins, one of our most beloved poets, who has chosen poems of wit, humor, imagination, and surprise, in an array of styles and forms. The result is a celebration of the pleasures of poetry -- from Laura Cronk's marvelous "Sestina for the Newly Married" to the elegant limericks of R. S. Gwynn and from Reb Livingston on butter to Mark Halliday's "Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women."

In his charming and candid introduction Collins explains how he chose seventy-five poems from among the thousands he considered. With insightful comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's thought-provoking foreword, The Best American Poetry 2006 is a brilliant addition to a series that links the most noteworthy verse and prose poems of our time to a readership as discerning as it is devoted to the art of poetry.

Contents

• Kim Addonizio Verities: 1
• John Ashbery A Worldly Country: 7
• Tom Christopher Rhetorical Figures: 14
• Beth Ann Fennelly Souvenir: 26
• Sarah Gorham Bust of a Young Boy in the Snow: 34
• Debora Greger My First Mermaid: 40
• Mark Halliday Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women: 51
• Laura Kasischke At Gettysburg: 65
• Mark Kraushaar Tonight: 78
• Danielle Pafunda Small Town Rocker: 91
• Liz Rosenberg The Other Womans Point of View: 106
• Charles Simic House of Cards: 119
• Gerald Stern Homesick: 120
• Ellen Bryant Voigt Harvesting the Cows: 134
• David Yezzi The Call: 147
• Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published: 189

About the author

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include The Morning Line, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. The most recent of his many nonfiction books is The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Billy Collins is the award-winning author of The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and Picnic, Lightning, among other poetry collections. He has edited the anthologies Poetry 180 and 180 More. He is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York, where he has taught for the past thirty years. From 2001 to 2003 he served as the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Best American Poetry 2006: Series Editor David Lehman
• Author: Billy Collins
• Editor: David Lehman
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 2008
• ISBN: 1439104859, 9781439104859
• Length: 224 pages
• Subjects: Poetry / Anthologies (multiple authors); Poetry / General; Poetry / Subjects & Themes / General