Poet's Choice: Poems for Everyday Life, Selected and Introduced by Robert Haas, The Ecco Press.

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Like all anthologies, this is a book about choices.

     It is difficult
     to get the news from poems
          yet men die miserably every day
          for lack
     of what is found there-

Robert Haas, sitting in his once-upon-a-time Poet Laureate office in Washington D.C. and watching the autumn sun "glisten on the Capitol dome", quotes these lines from William Carlos Williams to begin his anthology and presumably set the tone for what is to follow. Yet, like Bush appearing at a photo-op in front of a wall of slogans like "Jobs Now" or "Security for America", once these lines are quoted any pretense that they have something to do with the rest of the anthology is quickly abandoned. There are good poems in this anthology, no question-but far too many mediocre ones as well.

Although the majority of the poets included are American, Haas also chooses poems internationally, but with a predictable mainstream bias. For instance, he samples Elytis but not Ritsos. How can you talk about Greek poetry in the 20th Century and not even mention Ritsos? Back in the States, he chooses Joseph Brodsky but not Thomas McGrath, Silvia Plath but not Adrienne Rich. What is lovingly included often speaks loud, harsh volumes about what is excluded. If this is an anthology gathering together "poems for everyday life", then where are the poems about jobs and working?

This is essentially an inspirational anthology, a sort of Grandma Tillie's Garland of Poetry for Moody Lutherans collection. There's a much bigger anthology than this one, hidden somewhere under the same title. But this one isn't it.

I nearly fell over when Haas chose a poem by Pablo Neruda--though it is one of the early love poems. Haas then goes on to claim that Neruda's work is "uneven" ("uneven" = mainstream poetspeak for "political", as in: "critical of the United States Government") It seems odd that Haas would single out Neruda, a Nobel Prize laureate, communist, and one of the towering figures of Latin American literature, as having "uneven" work. Curiously, more than a few of Haas's contemporaries, whose work he samples here, such as Sharon Olds, Jane Shore or C.K. Williams, could be more accurately accused of having uneven work, but Haas is too busy showering tender praise upon them to apply whatever fly-by-night critical apparatus he used on Neruda.

If you only have so many poetry dollars to spend, don't waste your hard-earned dinero on this one. There is precious little to differentiate this tame anthology from a corral full of its gelded brethren, and there is certainly little news in it.