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Rating: 
Summary: COOL poetry on a theme
Review: Even my friends who think poetry is boring and ponderous and Buddha a smiling statue (thanks probably to some stodgy professors 20 years ago) couldn't put this book down when they spotted it on my coffee table. With a sly sense of humor and enormous knowledge of his subject, Gary Gach has taken a single (and often misunderstood)theme and compiled a "panorama" of examples that give life and texture to Buddha and Buddhism. What he has done is kind of like a hundred talented photographers, using radically different techniques, having their crack at one single image or subject, each in his or her own way. Uniting dozens of other voices, Gach has given texture and spirit to his subject. What surprised me the most is that this book never gets old -- I read it over and over again, sometimes a page, sometimes a poem at a time.
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Summary: EDITOR'S CORRECTION & UPDATE
Review: I am the editor of this anthology. CORRECTION: The title is not WHAT BOOK - the title is WHAT BOOK!? Exclamation mark, question mark. And an UPDATE: it received the American Book Award this year. This is the greatest honor.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: The movement of Eastern religions to the West has been one of the most remarkable phenomena of the 20th century. Beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing into the late 1990s, the influence of Buddhism (along with other Eastern religions) has been evident, perhaps most strongly in the arts and particularly strongly in contemporary poetry. Here is an enormous anthology of poetry celebrating that phenomenon.
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Summary: but where's the hiphop?
Review: These are poems that capture that shimmering moment in time and allow it to illuminate our lives. They are the poems, mostly small, that come from perfect attention - the result of a moment, rendered timeless.
The book also comes with some wonderful tips for writers from Allen Ginsberg.
The single problem: I could find the Beat, but where's the Hip Hop?
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