A treasure trove of poet's voices

One hundred poets, reading 464 poems, in a little over 17 hours. That's what's on offer in "The Spoken Arts Treasury: 100 Modern American Poets Reading Their Poems," first issued on LP in 1969, and now remastered and repackaged by Recorded Books in three volumes (6 CDs or cassettes per volume; $41.95 per volume on CD; $39.95 per volume on cassette; $14.50 rental per volume for both CD and cassette; 800-638-1304 or www.recordedbooks.com).

Here's Gertrude Stein, sounding oddly like Margaret Thatcher as she makes the fractured syntax of her "portraits" of Matisse and T.S. Eliot seem not just sane but eminently sensible. Carl Sandburg's delivery of a poem about a footloose Babylonian gal named Bilbea is surely the template on which Garrison Keillor has modeled his radio voice for the past three decades.

Elizabeth Bishop, as calm as if she's giving courtroom testimony, explains why "we'd rather have the iceberg than the ship." Gwendolyn Brooks brings a startling syncopation to her most famous poem ("We real cool. We / left school"). Allen Ginsberg raucously impersonates a barstool drunk in "Uptown, New York," while Sylvia Plath assumes the dry hauteur of a haberdashery clerk in "The Applicant" ("I notice you are stark naked. / How about this suit ... ?").

That's just six poets, with 94 to go. Some of them, it's true, tend to drone. But there are plenty of surprises and revelations here.

Michael Upchurch,

Seattle Times book critic