"Bestov, schmestov," but these poems are pretty darned good

One of the pleasures of the Best American Poetry series is its fantastic inconsistency. The volumes are as variable as the guest editors themselves, eccentric souls who sift a few dozen keepers from a year's landslide of possibilities.

A second, albeit perverse, pleasure is reading each editor's introduction, which almost always includes an elaborate repudiation of the word "best" — as if it were unseemly to suggest that some poetry is just plain better than other poetry. Unfortunately, the leaden prose in which many of the guest editors make their ritualistic disavowal can triple the weight of the volume.

This year's editor, Heather McHugh, a talented and accomplished poet who is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington, offers a selection as eccentric, sometimes as unabashedly goofy, as any in the series' two decades. And she wastes little of her witty prose apologizing for her choices: "bestov, schmestov," she says.

In fact, McHugh's brief essay alone is almost worth the cost of the book. Of the serendipitous connections that emerged when the poems were arranged alphabetically, she writes, "Incidents may be accidents — the way things fall, the case of all that is, with its roots in the Latin 'cadere.' But sequences grow consequential." Throw in a few judicious line breaks and you have two or three lines of poetry as good as anything in the volume, some of which is very good indeed.

She can be dazzled by wordplay, a common weakness among poets. Thus, she chooses a poem titled "Still Life with Half-Turned Woman and Questions," by Nicky Beer. A page of clever prose arranged as questions and answers, it begins, "Q. So what are you working on these days? / A metaphor machine." For a poet to say that what follows is figurative is like a comedian announcing that he's about to tell a joke.

But there are many poems that rise almost to the level of McHugh's own writing. "Money," by Carmine Starnino, is a brief history of coinage. It is also a meditation on our need for certainty, for truth worthy of a capital T. Not least, it is a wonderful cascade of sounds and images:

"Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes, / like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel, / mina and obol. Persia's bullion had a lion and bull."

The coins recall a time "when what you earned / was itself evidence of a life lived in labor, the stubble- / to-beard truth of busting your butt... "

Hard currency for hard work. Finally, because the coins were "neither metaphor / nor symbol, [their] quality could be checked by a chisel cut."

There's no hint that McHugh has any prejudices about form or the lack of it. Along with prose poems and every kind of free verse, she includes work that rhymes and scans. Brad Leithauser's "A Good List" could be set to music (and, in fact, is subtitled "homage to Lorentz Hart," the great lyricist). He writes, "Some nights, can't sleep, I draw up a list, / Of everything I've never done wrong. / To look at me now, you might insist / My list could hardly be long."

For five eight-line stanzas the poet enumerates the sins he has never committed, from petty to profound: "I never said 'air' to mean 'err,' or obstructed / Justice, or defrauded a securities firm. / Never mulcted — so far as I understand the term. / Or unjustly usufructed."

Heather McHugh puts a couple dozen of very fine poems right where they belong, her "bestov, schmestov" notwithstanding.

Richard Wakefield is the author of "East of Early Winters," a poetry collection published by the University of Evansville Press. He lives in Federal Way.