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The Best American Poetry 2006 (Best American Poetry) Paperback – September 19, 2006

by Billy Collins (Author), David Lehman (Editor)

4.2 16 ratings

Part of: The Best American Poetry (20 books)

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Billy Collins, one of our most beloved poets, has chosen poems of wit, humor, imagination, and surprise, in a range of styles and forms, for The Best American Poetry 2006. The result is a celebration of the pleasures of poetry.

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.

Part of series

The Best American Poetry
Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Scribner
Publication date

September 19, 2006
Dimensions

5.45 x 0.6 x 8.3 inches
ISBN-10

0743257596
ISBN-13

978-0743257596
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Each year, a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh and memorable: and over the years, as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be." -- Robert Pinsky

About the Author

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, is also the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include Poems in the Manner Of, New and Selected Poems, Yeshiva Boys, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. 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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; First Edition (September 19, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743257596
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743257596
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.45 x 0.6 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,919,539 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,511 in Poetry Anthologies (Books)
- #8,049 in American Poetry (Books)

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Billy Collins

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Billy Collins is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College, he was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Poems Selected for their Modern Beauty

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2006

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In my mind, poetry books should be a little like a movie, comfortable like your favorite chair and mostly an unforgettable experience. I will agree that most poems are only appealing if they somehow find their way into your psyche and heart in a way that is comforting, shocking, beautiful or even soul revealing.

Each poet is a world unto themselves and each poem is a door into a magical world where you either love or dislike the pathway you have chosen. The beauty of poetry is in how we vary in how we relate to any particular poem.

In "The Best American Poetry 2006," I found so many doorways to new thoughts it was as if this book contained 20 worlds from which to view life and its many moments invisibly charged with crystalline emotions, edgy contemplations, tantalizing twists and taunting mysteries.

I was relieved to read that even Billy Collins was unfamiliar with so many of these modern poets, although I was delighted to have found so many new poets whose work I enjoyed. Being a fan of Billy Collins' poetry seems to have enhanced my reading experience. His humor seems to jump out from various poems in a way that you might find his poems funny.

The surprising elements seem to mirror some of his own poetic genius and his love for scene painting with delicious sentences makes many of these poems comforting escapes into a certain normality infused with the inevitability of surprise and a subtle infusion of emotional complexity. Just as in life, some of the poems have a mind of their own and take off in playful directions, almost guiding the poet's mind in a temptation of language lust.

If you are looking for poems with highly complex structures and obscure words you need to look up in a dictionary, this does not produce such literary excitement, but what it does produce is a variety of emotional responses. These range from outright elation and laughing to deeply profound moods born of a life lived with longing and moments of reflection and regret.

From the fascinating foreword by David Lehman to the contributor's notes and comments, this book is filled with poems, stories of modern poets and journeys through worlds we know and love. We are at times riding on a boat writing a poem that sounds more like a letter (The Ferry), entering a bibliomaniac's world where a book is more appealing than the sight of a woman (Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women) and returning to past moments of great romantic significance as in the poem by Beth Ann Fennelly.

In Sarah Gorham's poem she speaks of two different ideas, but they merge and a beautiful image of souls falling like stars descends on your imagination. A poem about a Mermaid brings a sweet playfulness to the book and one poem takes you on a jaunty ride into rhythmic pleasure. There are a few poems with shocking conclusions that are quite funny and others that left me wondering how the poet was able to survive emotionally all these years to write about such disaster of the heart. My heart was captured by the poems of Kim Addonizio, Debora Greger, Mary Oliver, Mary Jo Salter, Terence Winch, Alison Townsend (she had me in tears), Reb Livingston (reminded me of childhood) and so many more. I think Dean Young has an interesting take on an idea from Alice in Wonderland.

I love the rebellious spirit in "Briefcase of Sorrow" where Richard Newman teasingly takes on a quote by Frances Mayes and literally paints an image based off a few words that seem to imply failure...and the poem races past the finish line and we feel like cheering, even silently. I will admit to the difficulty of even extracting a few lines to explain the beauty of the poems, because honestly the sentences are tightly woven together with meanings the reader could miss without the entire picture being painted in a set sequence of events that draws you in and presents clarity that often leads to a mysterious conclusions with a variety of interpretations. Instead of a moment here and a line there, you receive a much fuller experience and it is also emotionally satisfying.

Throughout The Best American Poetry 2006 you will find deliciously modern poems with pop culture references and plenty of moments you can relate to on a daily basis. This book is not filled with poems gathered from molding collections dusty with neglect found in some forgotten library. This is a collection of living breathing poems that sing the songs of seventy-five contemporary poets who reveal to us the life we are currently living and in that is the beauty of this reading experience.

If you are looking for modern romantic poetry, I can highly recommend "Eyes of the Poet" or "Poetry Collection de Jolie-Laide." For a truly magical experience you may also love " Something Familiar" by Kat Ricker. To truly say you have lived, you may also want to listen to Billy Collins read his poems. If you love this book, you will adore his poems. As a poet myself and a reader of many poetry books over the past few years, I can recommend this book as a welcome addition to anyone interested in collecting modern poems.

~The Rebecca Review

12 people found this helpful

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L. Fenwick

A wonderful sampling of contemporary poetry

Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2007

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Since a great many contemporary poems leave me confused or disappointed, I was delighted to connect positively with so many of the seventy-five poems selected by guest editor, Billy Collins. The editor's Introduction brought insights that contributed to my enjoyment, as well as providing guidance to would-be poets. Of course, the guest editor makes a huge contribution to the success of this annual series, and Billy Collins has ferreted out some treasures for 2006.

2 people found this helpful

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Bruce Kimball

More Keillor than Kleinzahler. What, is that a problem?

Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2006

I like this book, an annual publication with this year's selection and introduction by Billy Collins. I doubt that I would select these particular 75 as the "best" of the year if I were the emperor, but these poems are very readable, quite varied, and their subjects are often of considerable human interest, including several that are quite humorous. The sources include such varied publications as The New Yorker, Five Points and New American Writing. You don't need an MFA, an encyclopedia of mythology or a French dictionary to read it. Most lines make sense! Every poem has an expanded note at the back of the book that tells a little about the author and (in most cases) a little about the author's view of the poem. Some people would hate this feature, but I liked it.

My criticism? Almost the same as my praise. The poems are a little too vanilla, a little too PBS/NPR. The selection seems to be aimed at an older, middle-class audience that fancies itself to still have some intellectual sea legs, but doesn't want to get off the cruise ship and mix with the locals (there - I said it). There's not much for the adventurous or those who are looking for challenges, experimentation, unusual verbal/mental stimulation, or points of view beyond 1 standard deviation. Those who are familiar with pop literary criticism will fit this book somewhere into the kleinzahler-keillor spectrum and probably takes sides accordingly. I lean toward the kleinzahler in my preferences, but would definitely put this book in the keillor camp. The poet demographics are largely older white men, though there is a sprinkling of females (several, actually), youth, other nationalities, and people of color. Geezers are capable of some good poetry, and this book gives some examples.

There were several poems that I enjoyed a lot. These include "Race" by Bao Phi, "Religion" by Robert Wrigley, "Briefcase of Sorrow" by Richard Newman, and "The Sharper the Berry" by Mark Pawlak.

Although not my favorite, the most memorable poem for me is "Towards some bright moment" by Stephen Dobyns. The poet describes a scene he witnessed in New York City where a blind woman is kicking and cursing her dog. I believe I witnessed the same scene. At the time and location that he describes in the poem, I also witnessed a blind woman hitting and cursing her dog. And like the poet, I have also thought about that event a lot since then. My conclusions were a little more trivial than his - "Only in New York," I thought. "Why didn't I call PETA," says he, to put both reactions in a very small nutshell. This scene seems like something out an R. Crumb comic, where one person's shock is another person's poem - and then that person's poem can inspire the first person. To activate this scenario, I join the club and write this almost-haiku:

blind woman
kicking her dog
Yeow! a poem's birth hurts.

A little bit of compulsive sociology: as noted above, most of the poets in this collection are relatively old. I made of list of birth years (extracted from those wonderful end notes), and the average age is 52. I believe there were 4 in their 20s, but 18 in their 60s, 3 in their 70s and one octogenarian. Like I said, some of these geezers can write.

16 people found this helpful

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CJ

The Guest Editor make this a Great pick!

Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2012

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I have several of these collected works in the series and the guest editor really makes a difference. Reading the forward by Billy Collins is highly enlightening and the poems he selected are marvelous.This is the "Best" of the "The Best American..." series.

Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2019

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Great book. Love everything Billy Collins does or writes,

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2015