Best Poetry of 2006

Celebrate National Poetry Month with ten top titles

By Barbara Hoffert -- Library Journal, 4/15/2007

Do you love poetry? Then you might want to check out the web site of the Academy of American Poets, the driving force behind National Poetry Month. This year, the academy initiated a campaign to uncover the country's biggest poetry fans (see www.poets.org/poetfan). Whether they've launched a poetry book club or chalked poems on the sidewalk for everyone to read, these fans have great ideas about bringing poetry to a wider audience. If you're interested in doing the same, you might start with the following list, LJ's selection of the best poetry of 2006.

Fried's debut, She Didn't Mean To Do It, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and this follow-up was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Clearly, Fried is more than a promising poet; she's already arrived. The lean, clean lines of her second effort capture life as it is lived in sharp, socially charged vignettes. (LJ 3/15/06)

Some political poetry is mere rant, but not Espada's. Exemplified by this eighth collection, his work captures the depth of human experience as shaped by the political inevitabilities of both America and Latin America.

In the quietly assured voice one would expect of a Pulitzer Prize winner (for Wild Iris), Glück refreshes the myth of Persephone. No fancy language here, just absolute precision—the world "bleached, like a negative; the light passed/ directly through it"—that captures contemporary anguish in an ancient and enduring frame. (LJ 12/05)

All the energy of the icon-shattering Howl is found in this thoroughgoing collection of Ginsberg's work—a half-century of ground-breaking poetry in one hefty tome measuring over 1000 pages. (LJ 9/15/06)

He's better known as a novelist, but Harrison writes tough, meditative poetry that appeals to a wide audience, capturing hard-won wisdom in language often evoking the scary beauty of this country's Northwest. His tenth collection is blessed with both wildness and grace. (LJ 2/15/06)

Jollimore came out of nowhere to win this year's National Book Critics Circle poetry award for his first book. Would it be clichéd to say that here is an utterly fresh, original voice? Not in his case; just listen to a few lines—"Lay down them projects for the crackling stars./ The hourglass sifts itself. Stars sprawl and blaze/ in every each direction." Superb.

Three sections ("Braid," "Fray," and "Nub") continuing two serial poems ("Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu") that have been appearing over the last two decades here add up to one National Book Award winner. This rich, rhythmic account of the Dogon cosmology of West Africa makes for nonstop reading. (LJ 8/06)

Seidel's caustic poems are not meant to calm your nerves—the persona dominating them is sharp-tongued, cosmopolitan, and terminally discontent—but they do capture the imagination. A National Book Critic Circle finalist. (LJ 1/07)

Still writing after 40 edgy years, Reed continues to challenge us with poems that won't lie down and take things quietly and expect the same of readers. Including work from four previous collections and nearly 100 pages of new poems, this book is a winner. (LJ 5/1/06)

What can you expect of a poet who's founder of Verve Press, lead guitarist for The Figments, and cocurator of the esteemed KGB reading series? Diverse and innovative poems that always shake up the reader, surprising and pleasing in equal measure. A breakout second volume. (LJ 7/06)