The Pushcart book of poetry: the best poems from three decades of the Pushcart Prize

Power / Adrienne Rich

Peace in the Near East / Gerald Stern

Griots who knew Brer Fox / Colleen J. McElroy

Spring / Michael Hogan

Variations on A mound of corpses in the snow / Stephen Berg

Musical shuttle / Harvey Sharpio

end of science fiction / Lisel Mueller

Rabbit trace / Jarold Ramsey

sage of Apple Valley on love / Edward Field

We free singers be / Etheridge Knight

All kinds of caresses / John Ashbery

sleep / Philip Dacey

breaker / Naomi Clark

West Virginia sleep song / Ruthellen Quillen

Everyone knows whom the saved envy / James Galvin

There is a dream dreaming us / Norman Dubie

From Sweeney Astray / Seamus Heaney

Conversation by the body's light / Jane Cooper

Snow owl / Dave Smith

Running away from home / Carolyn Kizer

Pig 311 / Margaret Ryan

From Laughing with one eye / Gjertrude Schnackenberg

ritual of memories / Tess Gallagher

Quinnapoxet / Stanley Kunitz

otter / Seamus Heaney

Young women at Chartres / James Wright

I remember Galileo / Gerald Stern

Portrait of the artists with Li Po / Charles Wright

Breath / Heather McHugh

By the pool / Allen Grossman

Cantina music / Derek Walcott

Lagoon / Joseph Brodsky

Waiting in line / William Stafford

Floor / C. K. Williams

For Elizabeth Bishop / Sandra McPherson

World breaking apart / Louise Gluck

I sing the body electric / Philip Levine

From my window / C. K. Williams

journey / James Wright

southern cross / Charles Wright

Europa / Derek Walcott

snakes of September / Stanley Kunitz

Moles / Mary Oliver

I knew I'd sing / Heather McHugh

Procession / Philip Booth

man of many L's / Maxine Kumin

reedbeds of the Hackensack / Amy Clampitt

That bright grey eye / Hilda Morley

Consolation / Daniel Berrigan

power of toads / Pattiann Rogers

trickle-down theory of happiness / Philip Appleman

explosion / Susan Mitchell

Ground Zero / William Stafford

Ukiyo-E / Siv Cedering

fundamental project of technology / Galway Kinnell

Birthday star atlas / Charles Simic

Vesper sparrows / Deborah Digges

Rain country / John Haines

poem with no ending / Philip Levine

Wilderness / Vern Rusala

Turtle, swan / Mark Dory

throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly / Denis Johnson

Don't go to the barn / Tom Sleigh

noise the hairless make / Stephen Dobyns

Delfina Flores and her niece Modesta / Herbert Morris

I send moma home / Marilyn Nelson

Poland of death / Allen Grossman

That they were at the beach

Aeolotropic series /

Leslie Scalapino

garden of earthly delights / Czeslaw Milosz

Le Petit Salvie / C. K. Williams

Four from the Bandelaire series / Michael Palmer

Lament for the makers / Robert Pinsky

Cheer / Laura Jensen

Justice without passion / Jane Hirshfield

Tenderness / Stephen Dunn

Miller epithalamium / Leslie Adrienne Miller

May, 1986 / Sharon Olds

little death / Arthur Smith

Sequence / Marilyn Nelson

Interpretation of a poem by Frost / Thylias Moss

For you / Jim Moore

love of travelers / Angela Jackson

Furious versions / Li-Young Lee

Incident at Imuris / Alberto Rios

Miles weeping / Michael Waters

Listening / David Mura

Post-Larkin Triste / Mary Kerr

Ascension on Fire Island / Henri Cole

vacant lot / Gibbons Ruark

Dying in Massaschusetts / Donald W. Baker

Sesame / Jack Marshall

White boot / Michael McClure

Sun spots / Christopher Buckley

Seeing you / Jean Valentine

Mighty forms / Brenda Hillman

Voigt woman who weeps / Ellen Bryant Voigt

From the meadow / Peter Everwine

To a wren on calvary / Larry Levis

I would call it derangement / Gerald Stern

My father's body / William Matthews

Reading with the poets / Stanley Plumly

Ray / Hayden Carruth

Note I left for Gerald Stern / William Matthews

Old Testament / Philip Levine

In the land of the lotus eaters / Tony Hoagland

A. M. : the hopeful monster / Alice Fulton

Coleman Valley Road / Gerald Stern

Guilt trip / David Lehman

Suite for Emily / Lynda Hull

portrait of the self as nation, 1990-1991 / Marilyn Chin

Lost brilliance / Rita Dove

Twice removed / Ralph Angel

Salt / Linda Gregerson

Song / Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Something like happiness / Stephen Dunn

Film noir : train trip out of metropolis / Lynn Emanuel

deconstruction of Emily Dickinson / Galway Kinnell

Sadness, an improvisation / Donald Justice

Anna Liffey / Eavan Boland

history of paisley / Aga Shahid Ali

wood near Athens / Thom Gunn

dog was crying tonight in Wicklow also / Seamus Heaney

button box / Grace Schulman

Japan / Billy Collins

Aliens / Kim Addonizio

Below Fourteenth Street / Gerald Stern

No turn on red / Richard Jackson

Karma lollipop / Albert Saijo

For the young men who died of AIDS / Julia Vinograd

What the animals teach us / Chard de Niord

Black legs / Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Vous Etes Plus Beaux Que Vous Ne Pensiez / Kenneth Koch

lectures on love / Edward Hirsch

book of the dead man #87 / Marvin Bell

Histories of bodies / Mariko Nagai

Like God / Lynn Emanuel

Once a shoot of heaven / Beckian Fritz Goldberg

cup / Katrina Roberts

Mitch / Robert Creeley

Gravitas / Elizabeth Alexander

Also love you / Reginald Shepherd

sky blue dress / Cathy Song

Sand, flies & fish / Mong-Lan

All the aphrodisiacs / Cathy Hong

My dead dad / David Kirby

Biblical also-rans / Charles Harper Webb

workforce / James Tate

Penumbra / Betty Adcock

To grasp the nettle / Eamon Grennan

Jasper, Texas, 1998 / Lucille Clifton

Memory / Anthony Hecht

short history of the shadow / Charles Wright

Inheritance / Kwame Dawes

Limen / Natasha Trethewey

Beetles / Steve Kowit

Inventory / Eamon Grennan

Cock Robin / Miranda Field

church of omnivorous light / Bobcat Wrigley

Red berries / Jane Hirshfield

Sonnet / Karen Volkman

part of the bee's body embedded in the flesh / Carol Frost

Autochthonic song / Rebecca Seiferle

Primer of words / David Baker

dragon / Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Commerce / Michael Waters

Is / Bruce Beasley

Cain's legacy / Richard Jackson

Adept / Dana Levin

Wonder : red beans and Ricely / Sydney Lea

Landscape with hungry gulls / Lance Larsen

Horseflies / Robert Wrigley

My brother, Antonio, the baker / Philip Levine

Can't you hear the wind howl? / Frank X. Gaspar

Beetle orgy / Benjamin Scott Grossberg

Rose of Sharon / Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Best and only / Andrew Feld

Mediterranean / Rosanna Warren

Bright world / Carl Phillips

Elevens / Stanley Plumly

On the reality of the symbol / Geoffrey Hill.