"So welcome, readers, to a plurality of poets, a cornucopia of tropes,
and a range of interests."
-- From Billy Collins's introduction
The Best American Poetry series offers a distinguished poet's
selection of poems published in the course of a year. The guest editor
for 2006 is Billy Collins, one of our most beloved poets, who has chosen
poems of wit, humor, imagination, and surprise, in an array of styles
and forms. The result is a celebration of the pleasures of poetry --
from Laura Cronk's marvelous "Sestina for the Newly Married" to the
elegant limericks of R. S. Gwynn and from Reb Livingston on butter to
Mark Halliday's "Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women."
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.