Poetry notes.(Brief article)(Book review)

July Publications

Over his long career, W.S. Merwin has written--well--in a staggering number of genres, including lost ones, like the fable. The Book of Fables brings back into print two classic books of short, haunting, mythic prose by this great poet. It should be on every poetry or fiction lover's shelf. (Copper Canyon [Consortium, dist.], $20 368p ISBN 978-1-55659-256-0)

Many anthologies of "new poets" attempt to delineate the in crowd of contemporary versifiers, but few, if any, actually contextualize younger poets for study, which is exactly what American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, edited by poets Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, …