This is one of those “Best Poems…..” books that promises to provide the reader with a roadmap through the world of poetry with less effort and better results than just reading widely.  In contrast, however, to the run of the mill ‘best poem genre’ (a quick Google search of ‘best poems’ provided ‘about life’, ‘of all time’, ‘for kids’, and ‘about love’) this selection was made by a panel of superb poets and edited by a distinguished Yale professor, now deceased.

The panel (Eavan Boland, Thomas Gunn, Rachel Hadas, Michael Harper, Anthony Hecht, Maxine Kumin, J.D. McClatchy, Robert Pinsky, Mona Van Duyn, Rosanna Warren, and Richard Wilbur of whom at least six are also deceased which seems to be going around!) must have struggled with what to include since they ended up with 104, not 100 poems.  Among these works are lots of our favorites from Shakespeare to Frost, from Thomas Gray to Stevie Smith and even Casey at the Bat  Of all 104 here’s one that might be memorizable, even by me.  It’s On His Seventy-fifth Birthday by Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) and reads:

I strove with none for none was worth my strife,/Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;/I warmed both hands before the fire of life, It sinks,          and I am ready to depart.

As one who has struggled to memorize poems in my older years, I was thrilled to see Edgar Arlington Robinson’s Richard Cory, perhaps the only poem from my high school years I still can recite.

This collection fulfills its goals of presenting some of the best poems in the English language but suffers from the lack of form, coherence, and organization  that is common to all compendia.  Nonetheless, if you can find this 1996 paperback originally priced at $12 and bought by me at some used book store for $4, grab it.  It’s worth dipping into for the occasional inspiration and reminder that life is complex, often overwhelming, but ultimately beautiful and worth living.