The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

Dazzling in its range, exhilarating in its immediacy and grace, a collection that gathers together, from every region of the country and from the past forty years, the poems that continue to shape our imaginations.

From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Glück, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry’s daring energies and its tender understandings.

Other poets include:
Sylvia Plath
James Merrill
Amy clampitt
Jorie Graham
W. S. Merwin
Charles Simic
Allen Ginsberg
Frank O’Hara
Anne Sexton
Robert Creeley
Sharon Olds
Mary Oliver
Robert Pinsky
Mark Strand
Denise Levertov
Richard Wilbur
May Swenson
Michael Palmer
Mark Doty
Yusef Komunyakaa

J. D. McClatchy is the author of seven previous collections of poetry and of three collections of prose. He has also edited numerous books, including The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and has written a number of opera libretti that have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala, and elsewhere. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where he served as president from 2009 to 2012. McClatchy teaches at Yale University and is editor of The Yale Review.