The Best Books of 2001

Editor’s Note: This year, the Los Angeles Times considered more than 1,200 books. As we revisited those reviews, we concluded that our contributors reserved their highest praise for 82 novels and short story collections, 23 children’s books, 25 mysteries and thrillers, 10 poetry titles, 13 books on the West and 85 works of nonfiction. Their original reviews have been edited and condensed. In addition, we have selected some of the year’s best art books to illustrate the issue.

COLLECTED POEMS

By James Merrill

Edited by J.D. McClatchy

and Stephen Yenser

Alfred A. Knopf: 888 pp., $40

*

As early as 1972, in a review of James Merrill’s “Braving the Elements,” critic Helen Vendler defined the expectations his work had summoned up in what has become one of the most oft-quoted characterizations of it: “The time eventually comes, in a good poet’s career, when readers actively long for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life--under whatever terms of difference--makes you wish for news of yourself, for those authentic tidings of invisible things ... that only come in the interpretation of life voiced by poetry.” Now, with the publication of Merrill’s “Collected Poems,” we can finally see, at 888 pages (and not including the vast epic poem “The Changing Light at Sandover,” available in a separate volume), how strange and momentous that news of ourselves was and is. Reading the collected works of certain poets can feel enervating or claustrophobic; one feels trapped in a mind that lacked range or variety of response. But here, there’s more than enough--in humor and sorrow, in tones of voice, in diction, in subjects--to keep one engaged for days, for years, for life. Reading Merrill is like reading Marvell or Keats or Dickinson; having his lines in mind is that unique thing, a voice that says somebody was here before. Merrill--usually so fortunate in his friends--has been well-served by his executors and editors, McClatchy and poet and UCLA professor Stephen Yenser (author of “The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill”), who have collected the trade volumes and limited editions that appeared in the poet’s lifetime (thankfully restoring the original order of “Braving the Elements” and other books, rearranged in earlier selected volumes), as well as his sterling translations of Montale, Cavafy and others and a rich section of previously uncollected work, including his last poems.

Caroline Fraser

*

COOL, CALM & COLLECTED

Poems 1960-2000

By Carolyn Kizer

Copper Canyon Press: 500 pp., $30

*

Carolyn Kizer’s new book of poems is called “Cool, Calm & Collected.” Though this book is, without question, a sizable “collection,” it seems hardly cool or calm. What one feels, looking over the poems and translations, spanning 40 years of this distinguished poet’s life, are larger-than-life ego, wit, passion and sass. “Shucks a’mighty,” she cries, quoting a small-town conventioneer in an early poem. “If you’re an eagle, you just go.” Kizer’s aerie is high above the Poetry Wars, though she occasionally dive-bombs the odd pretentious literary gasbag or poet-lout. And when she swoops to hunt, she celebrates the chaos below with a distinctive chortling cry.

Carol Muske-Dukes

*

ELECTRIC LIGHT

Poems

By Seamus Heaney

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 98 pp., $20

*

In “Electric Light,” his 11th collection, Seamus Heaney travels widely--through Greece, Spain and Yugoslavia as well as Ireland, his own past and among writers he reveres--in search of origins. There are moments of illumination; some literal, as in the poem that gives the collection its title; some literary, including an adolescent encounter with Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”; many in response to the apparently ordinary transactions of the world. There is an account, both comic and triumphant, of Heaney’s tasting of the Castalian Spring on Mt. Parnassus, a site sacred to the muses, in defiance of the thunder-faced curator. In a collection that brims with joy, there is also a powerful, elegiac feeling, as Heaney honors the memory of a variety of old friends and fellow poets in dedications, quotations and anecdotes. There is a sense of urgency here, a desire to recall and acknowledge while there is still time, and there is a feeling in the longer pieces of the need to expand what the lyric poem can accommodate. Heaney’s status as one of the most significant poets writing in English and the greatest Irish poet since Yeats is already well established. “Electric Light” is further confirmation of his power to capture and transcend the immediacy of the moment, to find the stillness at the heart of things, like the perch in the Bann River “on hold/In the everything flows and steady go of the world.”

Joe Treasure

*

FELT

By Alice Fulton

W.W. Norton: 96 pp., $22

*

Alice Fulton’s poetic intuition is a kind of apperceptive proof--never false, though she plays endlessly with notions of artificiality. It is on display to best effect in the poem “The Permeable Past Tense of Feel,” in which a single word resonates in its literal meaning (a textile) through the metaphor of fabric’s interwoven fibers to the interrelatedness of all creatures. But “felt” is also a verb, the past tense of the verb “to feel.” “And though the world consists of everything/that is the case, I know/there must be ways to concentrate/the meanings of felt in one/just place.” Certainly, “felt,” the manufactured material, and “felt,” the part of speech and the universality of realized emotion, present a pure yet hybrid product, an oddly American product--familiar yet bizarre in its associations--but like the poems in this, her fifth book, the product is crazy-beautiful, expressive, original to a fault.

Carol Muske-Dukes

*

FRONTIER TAIWAN

An Anthology

of Modern Chinese Poetry

Edited by Michelle Yeh

and N.G.D. Malmqvist

Columbia University Press:

492 pp., $49.50

*

Compiled with a coherent view of history and certain political assumptions, “Frontier Taiwan,” an anthology of 20th century poetry from Taiwan, clearly makes a statement. Modern Taiwanese poetry, after more than half a century of separate growth and evolution, has become a literary territory complete in itself, a trunk instead of a branch. It is an entity that parallels the modern literature of mainland China without being part of that literature in either a national or cultural sense. The two are rivers that flow side by side, which have mingled and are now permeable to each other, but neither of which can eclipse the other in size or significance. The Western literary world, especially the English-speaking world, has long ignored the literary river that Taiwan represents. This selection of 430 translated poems by 50 poets boldly declares the existence of a modern tradition of poetry in Taiwan. The emergence of modern poetry in China was as magnificent, traumatic and revolutionary a breakthrough as any witnessed in world literature during the 20th century, yet the world has shown little interest in it. To introduce modern Chinese poetry to the English-speaking world is a mission that needs to be undertaken. The publication of this anthology is a timely step in that direction.

Bei Ling

*

INFERNO

By Dante Alighieri

Translated from the Italian

by Robert and Jean Hollander

Doubleday: 704 pp., $35

*

Dante in the modern epoch has exerted a special influence on the American literary imagination and scholarly energy. New American translations of the “Inferno,” if not of the entire “Divina Commedia,” seem to come along almost annually. Among the new versions of “Inferno,” that of the Hollanders is probably the most finely accomplished and may well prove the most enduring. The sheer versatility of the Hollanders’ translation is especially notable. We have immense literary pleasure to look forward to in these translators’ upcoming “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso.”

R.W.B. Lewis

*

ROOMS ARE NEVER FINISHED

By Agha Shahid Ali

W.W. Norton: 106 pp., $22

*

Agha Shahid Ali’s voice possesses a contemporary agelessness. Ali grew up in Kashmir, a citizen of that small mountainous country torn apart by religious wars, its colonial past and present status as disputed territory between Pakistan and India. What is timeless in these poems is the power of grief--sheer cliffs and drops of despair that he masters and spins into verse with astonishing technical virtuosity, employing his favorite form, the ancient ghazal, a leitmotif shaping a solemn, impassioned music.

Carol Muske-Dukes

*

SELECTED POEMS OF VICTOR HUGO

A Bilingual Edition

By Victor Hugo

Translated from the French

by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore

University of Chicago Press: 400 pp., $35

*

For 20th century readers of English with even some knowledge of French literature, Victor Hugo’s monumental poetic oeuvre of well over 155,000 lines--and this aside from the verse of his dramas--has stood like a vast, shadowed mountain, unvisited and unclimbed, celebrated and ignored. Hugo’s oeuvre has barely been touched by responsible poetic translation into English. E.H. and A.M. Blackmore give us a selection that is carefully considered. And it is the immense care taken, the knowledgeable love of Hugo’s verse, which shines through the whole of this book and which distinguishes it as so much more than agreeably competent work.

John Hollander

*

THE SEVEN AGES

By Louise Gluck

Ecco Press: 80 pp., $23

*

Poetry comes with so little explanation. We would never ask a poet, “Is your work autobiographical?” Of course it is autobiographical, yet its source is so deep in the aquifer of the self that it is not even about the self, elusive and yet so immediate, injecting itself right into the reader’s blood stream. This collection of poems is an exploration of Eden; inside, outside, experience versus understanding, paradise versus civilization. There is the Earth, an Eden that will cease to sustain us if we try to possess it. There is the gender Eden; that last summer of girls on the beach before the deluge of loving men. There is, as in the poem “Radar,” the girl who leaves the Eden of childhood: “I wanted my parents awake and vigilant; I wanted them/to stop lying.”

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

THE TETHER

By Carl Phillips

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 80 pp., $22

*

In this dark time, as America asks questions following disaster and loss, Carl Phillips’ poems argue for unsparing, inspired examination of that tethered falcon, the soul. He says, untethering the cliched spirit: “I think the soul wants/no mate/except body, what it has/already, I think/the body not a cage/no,/but the necessary foil/against which the soul/proves it was always/true....” Phillips is profoundly connected to a past that exists for him as a kind of parable that bleeds into the present, which he addresses with the most offhanded yet Rilkean intensity. He pares his lines down to almost nothing, yet his poems are immensely magnetic--they set up a dreamlike force field. And what better territory for us, for the inspired readers, the decipherers of truth, the pure products of America, to inhabit?

Carol Muske-Dukes