THE BEST POETRY OF 1998

Editor’s Note: This year, The Times reviewed more than 700 books. Here, in the judgment of our contributors, are the best fiction, poetry and children’s books of 1998. Culled from the original reviews, their notices have been edited and condensed for reasons of space.

Next week: The best nonfiction of 1998, including memoirs, biography, politics, history, economics and science.

ROAD-SIDE DOG; By Czeslaw Milosz; Translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Hass: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 208 pp., $22

The title and the first of these 142 tiny allegories, epigrams and poemlets faintly echo an old saying that exalts action above commentary: “The dogs bark and the caravan passes.” Czeslaw Milosz, the ironic and heartbreaking Polish poet, is the roadside dog. Poetry is the barking. Life is the hallucinatory caravan fading in memory. Approaching 90, he writes, he takes his past life “as no more than commentary to a couple of poems.” “Road-side Dog” is a valorous and beautiful work, in part because Milosz is unafraid to expose what is too late along with what quite marvelously is not. His inimitable vehicle is a vehicle in winter; and a number of his efforts--a partly fledged image, a thought that begins to scale the wall into unknown territory only to fall back--suggest a cold ignition whirring and failing to catch. Then, after three or four tries, comes a growl and exhilarating surge. There are poems as haunting as any he has written.

-- RICHARD EDER

COLLECTED POEMS 1920-1954; By Eugenio Montale; Translated from the Italian and annotated by Jonathan Galassi: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 626 pp., $40

So elusive, so helplessly mordant is Eugenio Montale’s work (he evinces something of the same muttering persistence in default, the same commitment to unattainable ideals, ungrateful landscapes and compulsive forms as his obsessed contemporary, the painter Giorgio Morandi), that these new and powerfully annotated translations fill, as the poet himself might say, a much-needed gap. He is the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi, and how welcome Jonathan Galassi’s scrupulous and pondered versions of them prove to be. As Walter Benjamin observed about Baudelaire--a poet almost as continuously present to Montale as Dante himself--a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translator at the time of their origin, their later translations mark their stages of continued life. With Galassi’s carefully studied translations, another link, a powerful one, has been added to the chain.

-- RICHARD HOWARD

MYSTICISM FOR BEGINNERS; By Adam Zagajewski; Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh;Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 70 pp., $18

In the title poem of this remarkable volume by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, the author takes us to an Italian town (Montepulciano in Tuscany) where, among the usual splendors of such places (the dusk “erasing the outlines of medieval houses,” “olive trees on little hills,” “stained-glass windows like butterfly wings”), he suddenly confesses his belief that the world given to our senses may not be all there is, that all this, “and any journey, any kind of trip, / are only mysticism for beginners, / the elementary course, prelude / to a test that’s been / postponed.” Zagajewski realizes that the mystical pursuit is essentially a contradictory one: Endless postponing of the “test,” as the title poem suggests, is often a part of the course. It is his skepticism and passion that make him one of the most interesting poets of his generation writing in any language.

-- JAROSLAW ANDERS

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE; By Geoffrey Hill; Houghton Mifflin: 96 pp., $22

Geoffrey Hill may be the strongest and most original English poet of the second half of our fading century, although his work is by no means either easy or very popular. Dense, intricate, exceedingly compact, his poetry has always had great visionary force. “The Triumph of Love” consists of 150 stanzas of beautifully and resonantly handled short free-verse lines ranging in length from one line to 57 but mostly from six to 25. The range of variation in diction, rhetorical level, degree and function of wordplay and, along that great spectrum from solemn to funny that true seriousness inhabits, provides in itself a kind of dramaturgy. The poem shifts from moments of densely allusive muttered epigram to more distant--yet always deeply related--moments of meditative lyric.

-- JOHN HOLLANDER

BIRTHDAY LETTERS; By Ted Hughes; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 198 pp., $20

The Happy Couple is back. In the spirit of “Lady Lazarus” (Sylvia Plath’s poem about a woman who thrives on death and returns from the grave at 10-year intervals), we have this decade’s version of a world-class marital mismatch in “Birthday Letters,” a collection of poems by Ted Hughes. The poems appear to have been written in eloquent exasperation, a literary last straw meant to put an end, once and for all, to the debate about who was responsible for the demise of Sylvia Plath. Not since Dante Gabriel Rossetti pried open his wife’s coffin to disinter the only extant copy of poems he’d written in grief and buried with her, only to change his mind about who was most deserving of them, has a book given off such an air of confrontation with the grave.

-- CAROL MUSKE

POEMS NEW AND COLLECTED: 1957-1997; By Wislawa Szymborska; Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh: Harcourt Brace: 274 pp., $27

Wislawa Szymborska, who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, must be one of the most reticent or most self-discerning poets of today. She struggles for the utmost precision of expression yet engages in complicated linguistic games employing rich polyphonies of her native tongue, unexpected rhymes, puns, mixtures of “high” and “low” poetic styles. Most important, she is a poet of modern experience, who often hides behind a mask of an “innocent” still capable of asking “naive” questions about the origins and nature of evil. One should be grateful to Szymborska’s long-standing translators, Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, for giving us most of her compact, intriguing verse in a superb English translation.

-- JAROSLAW ANDERS

TEN COMMANDMENTS; By J. D. McClatchy; Alfred A. Knopf: 120 pp., $21

Just when we’re despairing about the state of contemporary culture, just when we’re confronted with the sorry fact that Elizabeth Bishop’s collected letters (the single most passionate document about 20th century poetry we have) sold only 800 copies in England; just when we must deal with an American literary editor’s cheerful question, “But who is Cocteau?”; just when we’re about to jump off Mt. Parnassus, along comes a poet such as J. D. McClatchy to reassure us that the highest, most refining principles are still at play and that they have been applied, first and foremost, to his own poems, which are as new as they are old, as original as they are traditional.

-- EDMUND WHITE

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT PENN WARREN; By Robert Penn Warren; Edited by John Burt: Louisiana State University Press: 856 pp., $39.95

The publication of Robert Penn Warren’s collected poems in an extraordinary volume, magnificently edited by John Burt, should establish the permanent place of Warren’s poetry in America’s literary achievement. Between the ages of 61 and 81, Warren had enjoyed a poetic renascence fully comparable to the great final phases of Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens. John Burt’s devoted edition gives us the definitive text of all of Warren’s poetry and thus restores an American masterwork, one that will be read, studied and absorbed so long as the love for, and understanding of, great poetry survives among us.

-- HAROLD BLOOM

Contributors

Jaroslaw Anders is a writer and translator born in Poland. He lives and works in Washington, D.C.

Harold Bloom is the author of “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” which was nominated this year for a National Book Award.

Richard Eder is The Times’ book critic. In 1987 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

John Hollander is the author of numerous books, including “Selected Poetry,” “Tesserae and Other Poems” and the anthology “Committed to Memory.”

Richard Howard, poet and translator, is professor of practice in the School of the Arts (writing division) at Columbia University.

Carol Muske is the author of “An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems.”

Edmund White is the author of numerous books, including the novel “The Farewell Symphony.”