Rating: 
Summary: Every poetry lover should own this book.
Review: There's always something new and breathtaking, and poetry from many different cultures and times. A refreshing break from just English/American poetry. Seeing all the different works in one volume gives you a delicious sense of the different textures of world poetry, a scintillating tapestry of words, a symphony... I loved it.
Rating:
Summary: an awesome accomplishment
Review: This is an astonishing volume packed with beautiful poems. I honestly cannot think of a better gift for poetry lovers (or, indeed, plain lovers or anyone else...). Akkadian poetry, Nazim Hikmet, Tagore.... almost every single poet that I love is here. How did the editors manage do it???
Rating:
Summary: A honey of an anthology
Review: This is the best,most readable,comprehensive anthology of its type I have discovered. The selections are great with fine translations.The single column typography is very appealing.It is a hefty tome,over 1300 pages,so that I need a lecturn at times.The entries are chronological so that Chinese Poetry is in various periods rather than being all together.I wish I could read these poems in the original languages,but since I cannot,this volume will do nicely.Savor the poems, give a copy to a sensitive,dear friend.Well worth the price,new or used.
Rating: 
Summary: A Poetry Treasure Trove With Some Clinkers
Review: To my knowledge there is not other book like this one in print. It's a 1300+ page book that contains poems from all over the world from ancient Sumeria to the present. You will find poetry from the Bronze age; odes from the Ottoman empire; Latin American and Native American verses, and more from just about every country that has ever produced a poet. There is religious poetry from India and Asia, translations from Sanskrit and from medieval Russian. Vietnamese, Icelandic and Finnish poets are all represented.The book is bulky yet with a scope so immensely broad it still has to be a sampler. Major English poets like Alexander Pope end up with half a page while, strangely, Victor Hugo gets three-and-a-half pages. This is a book not just for those who love poetry, but for those who want a taste of history and culture. It's fascinating to go through these old texts and get a glimmer of the interests and feelings of people in different lands at different times throughout history. Now for the clinkers. A work like this requires a large number of translators, and some of them have been a little too free in their conversions to English. A poem of Martial (40-104AD) reads thusly: "Ted's studio burnt down, with all his poems./ Have the muses hung their heads?/ You, bet, for it was criminal neglect/ not also to have sautéed Ted." Hipponax (around 540BC) supposedly said, "Big Daddy/ no scrumptious feast of partridge and hare/ no sesame pancakes/ no fritters drenched/ in honey." And that most frequently translated of all classical poets Horace (65 -8BC) is accused of coming up with the lines "Dazzled though he be, poor dope, by the golden looks/ Your locks fetched up out of a bottle of Clairol.." Fun is fun, but I want a serious book of trustworthy translations when I buy an expensive anthology like this. Still, it is a remarkable book, and one of the most important additions to my library.
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Summary: The editors' experience of World Poetry
Review: World Poetry took five exhilarating and demanding years to compile. Diving into the accumulated riches of four thousand years of verse from around the globe yielded so much more quality, diversity and originality than one volume could ever contain that we hope, above all, that this book will open a thousand other doors for our readers--just as it did for us. Part of its excitement involved not only the continual discovery of uniqueness in every cultural tradition, but also the unfolding of endless threads of connection in the work of poets across frontiers of time and culture. Called forth from the centuries in a multitude of languages, renewed by the accomplishments of their poet/translators, these voices do not cease to move us through the music of their poetry and the universality of their concerns.
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