[.ca] New and Collected Poems (ISBN 0156654911)

From Amazon.com:
These collected poems of the Poet Laureate of the United States are, despite the prevailing view of modern poetry, a monument to the accessible and the beautiful. The language is lush, full "of heat and juice and heavy jammed excess," and deeply thoughtful. His concern for careful human stewardship of nature extends also to the artist's creative struggle to capture the truth of the world. One poignant poem, "The Writer," addresses this through his reaction to listening outside the door as his daughter earnestly struggles to compose a story on her typewriter: "It is always a matter, my darling/Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish/ What I wished you before, but harder." The collection won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1989.

the man is really good:
it's no wonder wilbur was once the poet laureate or that this collection won the pulitzer, the man is good. he uses the language beautifully (the way english was meant to be in poetry), he has tight control of the rhyme, meter, subject, and words in his poems. where he really shines is in his translations. wilbur is one of the best translators living today.

Poems That Matter:
Wilbur's poems are simultaneously thoroughly terrestrial and profoundly spiritual. When he describes an object, you see it more concretely than you did before. And at the very same time, you see beyond it, to a world which is infinite in all directions. "Advice from the Muse," "Hamlen Brook," and "The Writer" are especially wonderful, both as craft and as wisdom. These are poems worth memorizing.

Beauty & Wit:
Richard Wilbur is undoubtedly the best poet of the last half of the 20th century. This book collects all his poetry other than Mayflies (published later) and a couple translations. Buy It!

A dynamite collection from a formalist master:
This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection contains all of Wilbur (except his great translations of Moliere and Racine) in reverse chronological order of his books from 1989 to 1954. This is the opposite of most poetry collections, so it seems strange to have the poems get less confident as you read on. Still, the final poem, "The Beautiful Changes," is near-perfect and perfectly sums up Wilbur's paradoxical outlook: beauty is eternal and ever-changing. Wilbur is old school. He is all about meter and rhyme and beauty. His command of sound and sense is second to none alive. (He has edited a collection of Poe's poetry and is famed for his accurate verse translations of Moliere's plays.) As I read through this book, I put a star by every poem I liked. Flipping through it now, I see there is a star by almost every poem. I did not find Wilbur as deep or as challenging as Frost or Yeats, poets he is compared to by other reviewers on this site. I can, however, appreciate his mastery of the craft of formal poetry. This is not some bad pseudo-Shelley but really a poetry in the language of our time about the issues of our time. If you detest rhyme, complex stanzas and short, potent lyrics, by all means avoid Mr. Wilbur. But if you find delight in the artful manipulation of language then you are depriving yourself of happiness in not reading this collection.

A GRANDMASTER'S LIFE OEUVRE:
If you enjoy more than merely reading excellent poetry that rhymes and makes sense, but also composing some of your own, this is the master to be discipled by. Sitting at Wilbur's feet for years can't help but enable some of his craft to rub off by sheer delight or osmosis. Merely by associating with poetry the way it was meant to be written can permanently raise the bar of anyone's craftsmanship to new levels. There is a richness in Wilbur's best work that is unrivaled among his contemporaries and matched by few of his predecessors (Frost, Robinson, Yeats, Hardy, Housman). Also recommended: get your hands and mind on anything Wilbur has written in the form of Essays/Prose that describe what great poetry is and why it will always be core to the human condition. Although Auden once said 'poetry doesn't make anything happen' in his Sept.1939 tribute to Yeats' death, Wilbur's comes closest to making something happen at the spiritual, cognitive and affective level of the human psyche that proves his subject matter matters and always will. Other than the late Frost, no American poet would be more richly deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature than Richard Wilbur. But as a sincere Christian, he is laboring for no mortal pay; however, he humbly deserves all the accolades and tributes from what is past,or passing, or to come.