Professor Vendler's soul is in peril. Reviewing Black American broadsides in 1974, she found it 'sinful that anthologies and Collected Works should betray the poems they print by jamming them together and running them into one another.' Yet here is her Faber Book, a self-confessed anthology which, attempting to present 35 poets 'whole', aspires to be a collection of Collecteds. Probably we should leave the editor alone with her conscience and just be grateful to have the poems. But a hostile finger must be pointed at the publishers, who have produced a tome so stoutly handsome that it's hard to tear the pages out to read the texts as broadsides. An unsewn paperback would ease this problem.

LRB 2 April 1987 | PDF Download