grapez best poetry book of 2004

There’s newly fallen snow along the river. Ice has formed in jigsaw plates flowing downstream like a runaway winter puzzle. The Civic is slipping and sliding to work again while I’m thinking that the 2004 poetry book of the year is a double album set: Twentieth-Century American Poetics and Twentieth Century American Poetry edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, & Meg Schoerke. Besides the remarkable breadth of work in the former, they introduced me to the war sonnets of John Allan Wyeth Jr.—I was left shell-shocked. In the latter they allowed poets to speak through the drivers of the last century to the air waves of the current one. Great stuff! And where was the weathermen on this white stuff that fills the landscape with ten plus inches of infinite erasure. Lambchop is on the iPod and Panasonics singing “this is not poetry this is depravity this is an outrage.” Maybe you feel that way and that's your perogative. But being a New Englander and all, I’ll suck it up and head towards that festive void waiting for us at the end of the year.