Because we are in the early years of a new century, critics in every genre have scrambled to compile lists quantifying the century past. What are the hundred best movies, movie lines, sports moments, sports heros, songs, break-up songs, most important people, inventions, etc. Poet, Pulitzer Prize winner, former poet laureate and editor, Mark Strand jumped into the mix taking on the job of listing worthy poems. However, refreshingly, Strand isn’t interested in the superlative as much as others. He claims to have found a hundred great poems rather than the hundred great poems, and to do so, he has created, and acknowledged, a somewhat arbitrary set of ground rules. No poets born after 1927, with the exception of five non-American writers. Only poets from North and South America were included, for this Strand claims his own ignorance of African and Asian poetry. Finally, poets from the U.S. were to make up less than half of the volume. His decisions resulted in a surprising volume, valuable for its international appeal and its unexpected choices.

Strand orders the book alphabetically, starting with Akhmatova, one of Russia’s most famous poets. In flipping through the book, readers will find Borges, Blaise Cendrars, H.D., Zbignew Herbert, Eugenio Montale, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Stevens, Moore, Lowell and Fernando Pessoa. Here, one might delve into the long beloved “Fern Hill” and then discover, for the first time, the delicate nature of Inger Christensen, a gifted and internationally famous Danish poet. Strand’s choices reveal the richness of literature in the 20th century, even in the face of its horrors. Poet Theodore Adorno once wrote, “After Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric.” He later retracted the statement, saying “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured to scream.” In some of these poems, the tortured scream, in others, speakers rejoice over food, marvel over the small stifled cry of a distant aunt, lament the loss of a lover. Some poets hail from the Imagist school, others Magic Realism, others the Harlem Renaisssance, but each makes some substantive comment on the human condition. As Frost once wrote, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

Strand makes the book accessible to the layperson in a number of ways. First, the poems do not rely on obscure knowledge of literary figures or footnotes. They are such that the average person should have the knowledge to comprehend the basic plot and structure of the poem. Second, they engage sound in rich ways. As poet Frances Mayes has suggested, readers might think about running their hands over the top of the poem. Do soft s’s and m’s massage the palm? Or, cut with the hard expletive force of k’s and t’s and p’s? The sound of angry poetry can be the sound of a good cursing. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the sibilant s’s suggest the ever-present fog of the poem, lurking around every corner. For those with a little more specialized knowledge, the use of syllabics, metrics, rhyme, repetition, and other stylistic devices will engage the ear and the eye. Third, he ends the book with short author biographies, which include countries of origin and books. Fourth, he includes the permissions, thereby allowing readers access to the books from which the poems were taken. Finally, he includes an index, making cross-referencing easy.

Strand also includes poems of varying lengths, reintroducing readers to the joy of immersion in a long dense poem, the refreshing feeling of having woken from deep concentration. Thom Gunn’s “Lament” is such a poem, its rhymed couplets unobtrusive though they engine the poem, leading readers through death, which Gunn describes as “a difficult enterprise.” He chose to enter the poem from a place other than the obvious position of the mourner, although he inhabits that too. This duality adds texture to the poem.

Strand’s selections from some famous American poets will probably startle some readers well-accustomed to the safe choices of most anthologists, but they will undoubtedly delight. Sitting down with this book is a decadent experience, a chance to react with the whole of ourselves, from the gut reaction to a good poem to the intellectual and emotional processes through which we understand the poem. This collection encourages full body reading.