Reviewed by: New Poets of the American West Peggy Shumaker New Poets of the American West. Edited by Lowell Jaeger. Kalispell, MT: Many Voices Press (Flathead Valley Community College), 2010. 519 pages, $24.00. Creating a major anthology involves reading thousands of poems, considering and winnowing, arguing and compromising, securing rights and permissions. Doing all this with volunteers, many new to poetry, involves a multitude of small miracles and great generosity. Lowell Jaeger and his crew at Many Voices Press have created a monumental book, one that deserves a wide readership. It will welcome readers unacquainted with the West into the working lives and the inner worlds of many kinds of people. It will offer westerners new glimpses of what they thought was already familiar—glimpses with fresh perspectives. We see our prehistory and our many landscapes. We see natural catastrophes of wildfire, flood, and drought. We see human disasters of genocide, war, and poverty. We see ecological harmony and ecological obliteration, like clear-cutting or nuclear pollution. We see our families, our communities. We see our lives in all their complexity treated by turns with anger, with dawning awareness, with compassion. We begin to see ourselves. One design choice was especially wonderful: they put the poet's picture next to the poem. That seems friendly and appropriate. One choice was not so successful: they ran the bio note vertically down the outside margin, crowding the poem. I found this distracting and held my wrist over the notes as I read. I appreciate deeply the editor's great effort to balance contributions by women and men, to include urban voices, small town poets, and rural writers. This volume brings together poets gay and straight; old and young and in between; formally educated and self-taught; traditionally religious, spiritual but not dogmatic, atheistic. Many voices, yes. Clearly this anthology is meant to welcome readers new to poetry. When I tried to put myself in the mind of someone who hasn't read many poems, I discovered that nearly every poem rewards a first reading. Very few require a dictionary or a trip to Google. None would require an intercessor or an explainer. It's a thick book—450 poems by 250 poets. One probable first reaction from new readers: There's so much I don't know. I'd sympathize with these readers. The gaps in my own reading are large. And growing. That's true for everybody. So I would hope readers would choose poems that [End Page 98] offer intense and enduring pleasure. I would hope they use this anthology to go shopping for poets. What does this book offer those of us who read poetry every morning, every afternoon, every evening? This book brings us a lively selection of poets and poems who are old friends and a marvelous sampling of poets just beginning to find their readers. Some selections, though, seem unbalanced. In Arizona, we get poems from relative newcomers, but nothing from Ofelia Zepeda, whose ancestors have lived in the desert near Tucson for centuries. Who has the stronger claim? Richard Shelton has paid close attention to the Sonoran desert since the 1970s, but we see nothing from him. (Nor do we see any poems by poets in the prison workshops he's led for over thirty years.) I'll use Will Inman as an example, because he's dead and won't care. I knew him, admired his sense of justice, his teaching, his editing. His poems are fair to middling. We get four poems by Will, but nothing from Alison Hawthorne Deming or Norman Dubie. Sean Nevin, whose poems are wonderful, gets four pages, but there's no room at all for Jim Cervantes, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Steve Orlen, Lois Roma-Deeley, Jeannine Savard, or Jim Simmerman. The same happens in other states. For Washington, there's nothing by Tess Gallagher or Linda Bierds, two major gaps. But wait. There are larger gaps still. When I opened this book, I was shocked and dismayed to realize that it does not include a single poem from Alaska or Hawaii, both of which have been states for more than fifty years, and both of which lie...