A Beautiful Anthology of Poems For The Ages
Celebrating sixty-five extraordinary poets who have lived and worked in New Jersey, from Colonial times to the present, many of the poets included in this anthology are among America's finest. Stephen Dunn, the Pulitzer Prize poet, originally from Port Republic, writes the Foreword; X. J. Kennedy, the renowned poet, originally from Dover (whose comprehensive text, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry and Drama, has taught generations of college students), writes the Introduction.
The three editors, Emanuel di Pasquale from Long Branch, Frank Finale from Bayville, and Sander Zulauf from Andover, all poets themselves, had one simple criterion in compiling the works: they "wanted to hear the pure, clear words of the poets who have called this place home." They were interested in the sum of poetic greatness distilled from life in this state—the poetry New Jersey poets have written, whether New Jersey oriented or not.
The editors reached back to the earliest poets, including Philip Freneau, the Revolutionary War's "Father of American Poetry" from Freehold; Walt Whitman, the "revolutionizer" of poetry from Camden; and Stephen Crane, the poet from Newark who bridged the realists to the moderns. They included three key figures of modernism, William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, Marianne Moore of Chatham, and Kenneth Burke of Andover, as well as their direct descendants—the poets of the Beat Generation—Allen Ginsberg from Paterson and Amiri Baraka from Newark. New Jersey's three other current Pulitzer Prize poets, Yusef Komunyakaa, C. K. Williams, and Paul Muldoon, all of Princeton, are also included.
The result is a beautiful book of poetry for the ages. As X. J. Kennedy writes in his Introduction, "Without New Jersey, the world today would be darker and quieter; and contemporary American poetry, inconceivable."
