Best Poetry of 2005

British poet Armitage writes in direct, almost offhand language about daily events like a bus ride or a snowed-in Christmas, then suddenly throws in a deadpan account of a hitchhiker’s murder. Not the prolific poet’s first publication stateside but one that should put him on the poetry map here. (LJ 8/05)

Partly comprising Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook to have been nominated for a Pulitzer, and nominated in its entirety for last year’s National Book Awards, this book offers bold yet perfectly calibrated poetry that celebrates the act of making. Having most recently edited Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, Bidart is back doing something he’s done with verve since 1965: making poetry.

Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, and Ben Franklin as the subject of poetry? In her seventh collection, MacArthur “genius” Bierds makes it work marvelously, using these and other scientific figures to convey the wonders of nature in arresting and carefully observed verse. (LJ 4/1/05)

Often, poetry praised as plain-spoken is merely plain. But Gilbert’s rope-taut lines are just the opposite: quiet evocations whose essential stillness belie their underlying power: “To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat/ comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth/ all the years of sorrow that are to come.” Luminous with humanity, this book deservedly claimed the National Book Critics Circle Award. (LJ 2/1/05)

Goldbarth’s collections are true excursions, with the poet serving as a loquacious, entertaining, and ever-informed host. Who else would invite us for a ride on “ 'the fastest and the vastest’—some/ loud-trumpeted ad slogan a while ago, for yet another/ überglobal, multizillion–dollar telecyberfiber transport system”? Here Goldbarth salts his slapstick take on the world with some gravitas and again proves why he’s won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry not once but twice. (LJ 2/15/05)

In yet another wholly satisfying collection, the Dublin-born Grennan seems at one with nature, offering dense, weather-beaten lines that revitalize our connection with the world around us while reminding us that there’s a world beyond. The latest from the 2003 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize winner. (LJ 2/15/05)

With this string of jewels, Hamilton proves that you can do a lot with a little; brief but not spare, her poems are quietly condensed moments that refract the world in surprising ways. This is only Barnard professor Hamilton’s second collection, and it’s certainly not her last. (LJ 7/05)

The second in a tetralogy exploring the four elements, Hillman’s expansive new work examines air not just as “gusts & siroccos, chinooks, hamskin, whooshes” but as voice, song, and spirit. Were it not such a pun, one would be tempted to call this collection literally breathtaking; Hillman has pursued an ambitious program with remarkably fine-tuned language. (LJ 10/1/05)

It’s hardly surprising that Jess won the National Poetry Series for this work, but it might surprise some readers that it’s a debut. A biography in verse, this remarkable collection blends resonant imagery with excerpts from letters, interviews, and even contracts to resurrect the immortal blues musician Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter. Poetry has rarely sung like this. (LJ 12/05)

Elegant yet evocative, intellectually challenging yet utterly uninterested in experimental excess, the poems in this collection represent Merwin’s efforts to perfect his craft over five fruitful decades. “What you do not have you will find/ everywhere,” and you will find everything here. A National Book Award winner. (LJ 3/1/05)

Not every poet launches his career by winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and not every Yale Younger Poet makes the impression Siken has made (he got a National Book Critics Circle nomination, for instance). Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, his verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain: “Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake/ and dress them in warm clothes again./ How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running/ Until they forget that they are horses.” (LJ 6/1/05)

A dog’s monolog might indeed be as wise and yet as simply stated as the two dozen poems in this bilingual edition, evidence that Polish poet Szymborska richly deserved that Nobel prize. The particular excellence of her writing is summed up by her description of falling bodies in “Photograph of September 11”: “I can do only two things for them—/ describe this flight/ and not add a last line.” (LJ 10/1/05)

Young’s 2001 To Repel Ghosts was a highly charged work profiling artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In this “remix,” Young telescopes his vibrant, jazz-inflected lines to produce an even sharper portrait of creativity caught in the act. More intelligent work from an important writer whose Jelly Roll: A Blues was nominated for a National Book Award in 2003. (LJ 10/1/05)

A multi-award-winning author of essays, plays, fiction, and children’s books as well as poetry, Jordan died in 2002 of breast cancer. Remarkably, this hefty collection (clocking in at over 600 pages) doesn’t include all of her poetry. But it does present the best of every book she published since launching her career in the Sixties, and it ably reveals why Alice Walker says this witness to the African American experience “makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda.”

It’s been ten years since the death of Kenyon, a beloved poet whom every reader might regard as a best friend. Published shortly after her death, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems offered the essential Kenyon. This collection adds 35 poems to give us all her works in a single setting—a powerful testimonial to the trajectory of her career.

Witty, irreverent, and a febrile creator—this 800-page tome doesn’t even include Koch’s longer poems, which are getting a volume of their own later this year—Koch is impossible to read without smiling. Koch’s Collected Fiction also appeared last year, published by Coffee House Press, but Koch was first and foremost a master of verse—the deserving winner of numerous awards, including the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.

In his ten books of poetry, Kooser has celebrated the simple things—and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts. Now, with his 2005 appointment to a second term as U.S. poet laureate, he has even more to celebrate. One of Kooser’s first acts as laureate was to launch a program called “American Life in Poetry”, which offers newspapers nationwide a free weekly column introducing a poem by a living poet. (Good fuel for reading group discussions?) For readers who need to catch up with Kooser himself, this book presents two significant collections, Sure Signs and One World at a Time, that have been unavailable. (LJ 4/15/05)