I find that the Best American Poetry is always enjoyable. Sometimes it is enjoyable because the poems astonish and delight, and sometimes it is enjoyable to hate. 2005 is surprisingly good. What one would identify as the more traditional of poetic virtues are openly on display. While certain of the poems felt gimmicky or cute, there was, running through it, an emotional intelligence and attention to the music of words that's been missing in recent volumes. This isn't surprising when one considers that its editor, Paul Muldoon, is as musically deft as any poet in the language today.

There are offerings from many of the familiars: Ashbery, Simic, Tate, Kinnell. There are also offerings from several of our great dead poets (Ammons, Justice, Bukowski), who somehow continue to be producing quality verse. This seems somewhat unfair, but perhaps poets truly are better off dead. Ammons's poem, where he mentions the flurry of death in his own life alongside other things that happen in bunches (marriages, first children) and Justice's poem about an old fisherman dancing by himself on a dock were possibly the two most moving pieces of work in the volume. Other highlights for me were Matthew Yeager's narrative poem about the huge tinfoil ball in the small city apartment (which my seven year old son also enjoyed) and Stephen Dunn's poem "Five Roses in the Morning."

Overall, I would pick this volume up.