Rating: 
Summary: variety of voices and moods
Review: If you enjoy Garrison Keillor's "A Writer's Alamanac," as I do every morning when it arrives in my email inbox, you will relish this collection of poems. A variety of voices and moods, of experiences and dreams, await you as you turn the pages. Some of the works are by obscure poets; others are by widely known, established writers.
"Good Poems" was recommended to me by a newspaper columnist who received it as a birthday gift. The book makes a great gift for someone who savors good writing--perhaps one of the "English majors" Garrison is always gently parodying on his radio program.
Five stars.
Rating:
Summary: HERE IS AN ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY....
Review: ....that's worth its weight in gold! Brings together a marvelous choice of past and present, old and new, and is full of surprises! Poetry lover or no, buy this now!
Rating:
Summary: Good for Keillor; good for us
Review: A fine anthology. One that I suspect will attract new readers of poetry due to Keillor's name on the cover. Readers will be rewarded with a nice breadth of styles from which to choose.
Rating:
Summary: Good Collection of Good Poems
Review: Although I am not one of the most experienced readers or writers of poetry, I do read quite a bit and can vouch for how a set of poems has impacted me and my direct surroundings.I agree with many of the good things said about this book in previous reviews. It may not be the most advanced or challenging set of poetry to read, but challenge and intellectual intrigue are not my primary concern when reading poetry. I'm impressed if I can flip through a set of poems, enjoy many of them on first read, and gaze at a few of them with utter respect for the apparent simplicities and subtle complexities. It is hard not to respect a poem that grows warmer with every tread. Whether the reader agrees with the types of poems placed in the collection or not, this set does its job well. I *can* flip through this set of poems in a short 3-5 minute break and something may catch my eye. I feel that he has picked good poetry for people--in general--to read. Let me exemplify: I was at the airport newstand looking at the usual Computer magazine section as usual (The Poetry journals I enjoy aren't sold at smaller newstands), and out the corner of my eye, I saw my friend holding _Good Poems_. He is not especially interested in poetry, but he just picked this up out of curiousity. It may have been something about the blatant title, or the fact that this was sort of unique on the newsstand, but he liked a poem in it. I grabbed a copy for me to look at and reading some titles I recognized in the contents, I was beginning to be impressed. This isn't mediocre poetry as some reviews have described it. It's precisely what the author said, there's something Good about them that is warmly, but stubbornly presented to an audience much larger than I would have expected...now whether that's the poet's goal or not is irrelevant. I think Keillor did a fine job--thank's for catching my friend's and my eye!
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Summary: Title Says it All
Review: I don't normally read poetry. It's one genre I'm very ignorant about but I like Garrison Keillor's story telling and figured I might like the same type of poetry he likes. I was right! Although I didn't enjoy every single one (and who can expect to in a compillation of more than four hundred pages) but I did enjoy or take meaning away from enough of them to count this book as a page turner.
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Summary: Delightful stress reduction therapy
Review: I have this book and CD audio. I love to read poetry, but to hear it is luxury. What a great gift. What a delightful collection of my favorite poets: Dunn, Collins etc. -- too many to name. My favorites are Robert Bly reading two poems on disc one and Ginsbery reading Whitman.
Rating:
Summary: A good read before you kiss the kids goodnight
Review: I read these poems to my children before putting them to bed. The poems are consistently good, simple, and thought provoking for both a tired dad and a couple of kids around 10 years old. You know you have a hit on your hand when everyone is looking forward to tonight's poem.
Rating:
Summary: Better "Good" than "Best"
Review: Keillor's title seems intended to suggest a contrast with the "Best American Poetry" series, and what a contrast it is! Whereas BAP routinely and inexplicably celebrates dreck (it's a scandal how many terrific poems it excludes in favor of the mediocre and that most banal of banalities, the avant-garde), Keillor's anthology is full of readable, memorable, enjoyable poems--poems that can honestly be said to be _valuable_. How refreshing it is, too, to see poems by the likes of Lisel Mueller and Robert Morgan, poets whose work has long been highly lauded but who nevertheless get overlooked by most anthologists. Rita Dove may be right to complain about the small number of minority voices (see her letter in the June/July 2004 issue of Poetry magazine), but this is still the best general-interest poetry anthology to come along since Czeslaw Milosz's BOOK OF LUMINOUS THINGS.
Rating: 
Summary: It's an anthology, but don't let that frighten you...
Review: These kinds of major-press anthologies (especially when put together by a celebrity) tend to be worthless: either heartwarming sop (i.e. "Poems that have Inspired Me") or the same English-class warhorses trotted out again. So I thumbed through "Good Poems" and was surprised to find...good poems; a mix of the standards (Frost, Dickinson, Shakespeare), modern academics (Oliver, Simic), and poets who seldom appear in these kinds of anthologies (Carver, Ferlinghetti, Bukowski.) Well-selected, thoughtfully placed, and (thank God) fun to read, this collection is a real jewel; a perfect gift for someone who thinks they could never like poetry. Even if the poetry was less than stellar, this book would be worth buying just for Keillor's introduction. Instead of gushing empty platitudes, he takes a hard look at what makes a poem good (as opposed to just technically proficient.) Anyone interested in writing poetry should do themselves a favor and read it (Personally, I'm thrilled that someone else thinks Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Allen Ginsberg are overrated, though I have to admit T.S. Eliot is growing on me...)
Rating:
Summary: good anthology
Review: This book caused a bit of controversy, but I'm not sure why. What it is, is a collection of poems that Keillor thought were good poems. It isn't meant to teach out of or to be representative of anything other than one man's personal tastes. And what taste he has. Sure there are some poets and poems missing. And there are some bad poems in here. But most are good poems and then there are some truly great poems in here. But I'll let the poets included speak for themselves. Here is a partial list of SOME of the poets you'll find within:
Ginger Andrews, W.H. Auden, Hillaire Belloc, Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Robert Bly, David Budbill, Charles Bukowski, Robert Burns, Hayden Carruth, Raymond Carver, Billy Collins, Wendy Cope, e.e. cummings, Roy Daniells, Emily Dickinson (and you'll find a lot of her in here), Tom Disch, Stephen Dobyns, Stephen Dunn, Ralph Waldo Emerson, B.H. Fairchild, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Erica-Lynn Gambino, Deborah Garrison, Dana Gioia, Linda Gregg, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Geof Hewitt, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Erica Jong, Donald Justice, X.J. Kennedy, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, D.H. Lawrence, Li-Young Lee, Ursula Leguin, Denise Levertov, April Lindner, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Lux, Walt McDonald, Herman Melville, William Meredith, W.S. Merwin, Robert Mezey, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Frederick Morgan, Howard Moss, Lisa Mueller, James B(all) Naylor, Howard Nemerov, Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, Robert Phillips, Theodore Roethke, Kenneth Rexroth, Kay Ryan, May Sarton, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Gary Snyder, William Stafford, Wallace Stevens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joyce Sutphen, May Swenson, Sara Teasdale, Henry David Thoreau, John Updike, Walt Whitman, Richard Wilbur, Oscar Wilde, C.K. Williams, Hugo Williams, William Carlos Williams, James Wright, W.B. Yeats
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