I almost titled this post “Everybody’s Doing It, Why Can’t I?”? (after the Cranberries’ first album), since it seems de rigueur to compile year-end lists of various kinds (ten best Britney Spears meltdowns, ten worst George W. Bush malapropisms, etc.). I actually love lists but, as usual, I decided to jump on the bandwagon after it had not only already left for another town but probably already left that town in turn. (What is a bandwagon, anyway?)
I was very distracted last year by travel and especially illness (including illness while traveling), which culminated in my recent colon cancer surgery and my starting chemotherapy. So there was a lot of reading and writing that I meant to do but didn’t get to. I also live very far from any literary scene (which I sometimes think is a good thing), and so I just miss a lot. And I’m poor, so I don’t have a lot of money to buy books of poetry.
All that said, what follows is a list of some of the poetry books published in 2007 I did read that mattered the most to me. It’s not a “best poetry books of 2007”? list (I’ve hardly read enough of last year’s poetry books to make such a judgment). It’s not even a list of all the poetry books published last year that I enjoyed.
I’m sure there are other books published last year that I would have enjoyed or even been impressed by that I just didn’t hear about. For that matter, I have a lot of poetry books, from last year and before, and from a wide range of writers, that I haven’t had the chance to read yet, and might well love when I finally do.
But enough preliminaries. Let’s get this party started.

Some Poetry Books Published in 2007 That Meant a Lot to Me
Christopher Arigo, In the Archives, Omnidawn
These lyrically fractured epistemological poems seek out “what is hidden in the archives”—also known as the truth, “the startling realness of some firm ground.” The search is as illuminating as any possible goal.
Bruce Beasley, The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems, University of Washington Press
Beasley has an enviable gift for the extended arc, in poems that combine unabashed lyricism, spiritual exercises in the relation of the body to the soul, and forays into neuroscience, biochemistry, and quantum physics. He is a modern metaphysical who has made the intersections of mysticism and science his own.
Paul Celan, Snowpart/Schneepart, translated by Ian Fairley, Sheep Meadow Press
A graceful and appropriately skewed translation of Celan’s posthumous final volume. “Celan does not speak explicitly, but he never fails to make himself clear” (Paul Auster).
Peter Gizzi, The Outernational, Wesleyan University Press
These poems, some laconic, some sprawling, set out from the lyric in all directions at once, from adult wonder to child-like mourning.
Noah Eli Gordon, A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow, New Issues Press
The sharp-edged lyricism and patterned repetition and variation of these sound-led, slightly spiky, highly intelligent poems (“whose you is a whisper all verb”) are striking.
Catherine Imbriglio, Parts of the Mass, Burning Deck
Imbriglio’s poems explore the conjunctions and collisions of science, Roman Catholic liturgy, personal history, New England landscapes, and several dictionaries. Her poems combine formal exploration with a passionate intellectual and emotional drive.
Joanna Klink, Circadian, Penguin Poets
These poems offer up the natural world as an object of contemplation and meditation, the speaker stepping from what she observes, a world stripped down to its essentials. I have written at greater length about this book in The Boston Review, to be found here.
Joshua Kryah, Glean, Nightboat Books
I wrote of Paul Celan in my previous post, and this is the only work in English I’ve ever read that, in its fractured, fractious, hopeless devotions and its addresses to an impossible and inaccessible “you” who is both lover and god, I find at all comparable to Celan.
Tim Lilburn, Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn, selected and with an introduction by Alison Calder, Wilfred Laurier Press (Canada)
This is a slim compilation of the work of a Canadian writer whose verbal profusion, dense music, lush imagery, ecstatic, pantheistic sense of nature, and intellectual/emotional passion are intoxicating.
Martha Reed, Tender Box: A Wunderkammer, Lavender Ink
An example of what a large role chance plays. I had never heard of this book, but I read with Reed in November and fell in love with her chamber of verbal and imagistic wonders. “A single splendor, this (sweet) enclosing space.”
Laurie Sheck, Captivity, Knopf
These brief, intense lyrics take American captivity narratives as the starting point for explorations of the imbrication of strangeness and familiarity (“an otherwise/Opens in the body”), and of captivity as a state of mind, the speaker trapped by nature, by history, by desire, by thought itself.
Reginald Shepherd, Fata Morgana, University of Pittsburgh Press
Yes, I went there. It would be pretty odd if my own book weren’t one of my favorites of the year. This book combines formal exploration with personal history, mythology, immersions in and interrogations of landscape, and investigations of the social-historical field through whose lens the world is both clarified and distorted, a mirage always just out of reach.
Sam Witt, Sunflower Brother, Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Witt’s work combines linguistic extravagance with a strong personal presence. He puts it better than I could when he describes his work as “post-confessional and avant-garde…as experimental as it is traditional, equally concerned with breaking apart and revealing the moment in a violent new language as it is in following traditional narratives of beauty, confession, and catharsis.”
But wait, there’s more! More lists, that is, same bat time, same bat channel.

01.15.08 PERMALINK | ONE COMMENT

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