cover image The Oxford Book of English Verse

The Oxford Book of English Verse

. Oxford University Press, USA, $45 (750pp) ISBN 978-0-19-214182-8

First compiled in 1900, the Oxford Book has been one of the few giant poetry anthologies intended more for bedsides and train rides than for classrooms. Author of books about Keats and T.S. Eliot, and creator of The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, Ricks must be one of the few people on the planet both famous enough to be asked to remake this book and widely enough read to do it well. His new version (the first since 1972) starts with anonymous 13th-century lyric and ends with Seamus Heaney; in between are seven centuries' worth of poems in English from Britain and Ireland. (Poets from other countries are excluded--except Derek Walcott.) Ricks brings in plenty of dialect verse, excerpts from long poems and verse plays, and a few translations into English. Some choices from major poets seem eccentric: of Pope, eight excerpts, and not one complete major poem? Of Wordsworth, eight poems, one in two versions? Twentieth-century choices look either ""conservative"" or idiosyncratic: William Empson (4.5 pages) gets almost as much space as Yeats (5.5), Basil Bunting only a page and a half (of translations). But such anthologies stand or fall on findings from minor authors, and Ricks offers a bounty of obscure good poems, among them Richard Corbett's sharp-tongued ""Farewell, rewards and fairies""; Caroline Oliphant's wrenching Scots lament; a resonant story-in-verse from the second James Thomson; a harsh condemnation of war from Rudyard Kipling; and enjoyable silliness from W.M. Praed (""I'll cultivate rural enjoyment/ And angle immensely for trout""). Ricks also includes poems famous for nonliterary reasons: ""Twinkle, twinkle, little star,"" for example (by one Jane Taylor). Long after reviewers stop debating how Ricks chose each item, readers will keep returning to these pages to find yet another good poem they've not before seen. (Nov.)