Poetry Picks: The Best Books of 2007

Selected by Bob Holman

This was Alice Notley’s Year -- we just called it 2007, but two of her books entered the world this year. And two big books on two big but generally overlooked Heroes of the Beats, Helen Adam and Philip Whalen, made a deliciously illogical sense in this, the Year of the Continuing Break-down of US Democracy.


Grave of Light: New & Selected Poems 1970-2005, by Alice Notley








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Wesleyan University Press


(Wesleyan University Press, 2006) Not only did two of Alice Notley’s books come into the world this year -- it’s also the year that the Academy of American Poetry saw fit to award the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize to an expat poet in Paris who figured out how to do it (write the poems to change gravity) as an “experimental third generation New York School poet.” No doubt Grave of Light is the best intro to the incredible range of Notley, from the breezy, Berriganish early work to the genuinely bizarre form and astonishing political/folk epic content of The Descent of Alette to the dense mysterious prose-po combo found in the recent Disobedience and Alma. It’s like sailing a mirror, a gloss on the moss. 









In the Pines, by Alice Notley
(Penguin Group USA, 2007) Grave of Light is the best place for readers new to Notley to begin... But for me, it’s the amazing trip of In the Pines that squeals the wheel. Notley has never steered away from the hard parts, but never before has she dared the Reader to join her in seeing just how much pain one can endure, how much beauty one can stand. There is no one else in literature whose voice moves so deeply inside you, and moves things so deeply inside you, as you read. Book of the Year, poet of the age, Alice Notley. 




A Helen Adam Reader, edited by Kristin Prevallet
(National Poetry Foundation, 2007) Adam (1910 - 1993), a tiny Scottish figure, the Den Mother of the Beats, wrote primarily in a jangly, Scots ballad style, often contemporized: “Goodbye transcendent Tompkins Square / I haven’t long to stay. / A double jolt of heroin and I’ll be on my way…” And always with a veneer of myth, generally Egyptian. But Prevallet is not content with these generalities, and uncovers in Adam not only the odd woman out of the Beat movement, but an extraordinary outsider artist, a cohort of Duncan’s, a precursor of performance poetry, a genuine eccentric, and a poet to be reckoned with. This book is an incredible achievement. 




The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, edited by Michael Rothenberg
(Wesleyan University Press, 2007) Philip Whalen, who died in 2002 at the age of 79, had Gary Snyder and Lew Welch as roommates at Reed College, read at the Gallery Six world-shatterer, moved with Snyder into Buddhism, but found his own path moving further and deeper into his Buddhism, always integrating practice and poetry, until there he was, blind, dying and writing poems by voice, abbot of San Francisco’s Hartford Street Zen Center. His poems move at the speed of consciousness, flickers of meaning, light sketches exploding into shards’ satori. Michael Rothenberg’s labor of love pays off big time: it’s the Great Big Book of Immediate Observations of the Tiniest Things, and it’s a book to keep by your heart. 




Complete Minimal Poems, by Aram Saroyan
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007) Oh boy does this book make you happy! I’ll never forget when I first saw a Saroyan poem – in the late 60s, somehow a box of his books found its way to a second-hand motors and tubes sidewalk stand on Canal Street – “lighght” was the poem, one word centered on the page. Go gaga, I thought and did. And here, resurrected by the revolutionary and beloved Ugly Duckling Presse, is Saroyan’s entire oeuvre of gems, some one letter, an occasional poem of ten or so words. “Every days” is one, “REMIEIMBER” another. Then there’s “whistling in the street a car turning in the room ticking” – a poem? or, a Novel in a single line of eleven words. 




Mi Revalueshanary Fren, by Linton Kwesi Johnson








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Ausable Press


(Ausable Press, 2006) This first-US publication of the great English dub poet is a cause for celebration. It’s got a CD of readings included, too, so if you need a lift or launch to be in on the Jamaican Creole that LKJ uses to get the points across, well -– it’s all music. Russell Banks gives an insightful take on the poems, the politics, the ultimate artistry of the poet who made the spine for Marley to dance on. 









Teeth, by Aracelis Girmay
(Curbstone Press, 2007) A first book, Aracelis Girmay’s Teeth bites hard, leaves a deep impression. Politics and human tales hand-in-hand, much Americana, much Neruda power, tastes of Eritrea (a Land of Poets in the Horn of Africa) and Boricua (Puerto Rico, to Puerto Ricans) and lots of downtown New York. But it ain’t boho, it ain’t artsy, it’s a place to live, work, play. And write poetry. This book, like a first book oughta, tastes everything, and is thrilled and horrified and ready for more. Me too. More from Aracelis Grimay! 




Tales of the Out & the Gone, by Amiri Baraka








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Akashic Books


(Akashic Books, 2006) Technically, this is a book of short stories. And technically it came out last year. But – Baraka’s prose is more of a poem than most poets’ poems and I didn’t read that bouncy, wild ride till 2007 – so, Enjoy! 








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