Frost said a good poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom," and the same can be said of a good poetry collection. The Best American Poetry 2012 fills that objective thanks to the inspired selections of guest editor Mark Doty. " 'Best' is problematic," he admits in his introduction. "This book might well be called Seventy-Five Poems Mark Likes."
Doty's anthology begins with a delightful first line from Sherman Alexie: "The music of my youth was much better/ Than the music of yours. So was the weather" and ends with Kevin Young's revelation about his pregnant wife's sonogram: "And there/ it is: faint, an echo, faster and further/ away than mother's, all beat box/ and fuzzy feedback. You are like hearing/ hip-hop for the first time--power / hijacked from a lamppost--all promise." In between, Doty shares works from familiar poets like Mark Strand and Frederick Seidel as well as relative newcomers like Erica Dawson and Michael Morse. The best selection may be Spencer Reece's long "The Road to Emmaus," a dramatic narrative in the styles of E.A. Robinson and T.S. Eliot paying tribute to the narrator's AA sponsor "caged in his worries of doctor bills, no money,/ and running out of people to ask for it: / mulling over mistakes, broken love affairs." Overall, Doty's bias toward "a certain disciplined richness of language, a considered relation between restraint and gorgeousness," yields one of the strongest collections in this estimable series' 25-year history. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.