BOOKS IN BRIEF Poems of New York edited by Elizabeth Schmidt Everyman’s Library, 256 pp., $12.50 I’ve long thought the three great subjects for art are faith, love, and New York City, so I was eager to open Poems of New York, a small-format paperback in the revived Everyman’s Library. What a disaster it is. Whenever the selections within an anthology are ordered by the alphabet or chronology, you know the book is under-edited. What would you think of a magazine that published articles alphabetically? And the large defects reflect deficiencies in details. As I was reading the selections, most of them from familiar names–Whitman, Melville, Moore, W.C. Williams, Hughes, Hart Crane, Cummings, Ginsberg, Kinnell–I was repeatedly reminded of who and what wasn’t included. The anthology lacks most conspicuously David Ignatow and Harvey Shapiro, who made New York City life their principal subject in classic poems grittier than those included here. Biased to favor famous poets who incidentally wrote about New York, this anthology has no surprises. Eschewing poems more innovative than those associated with the “New York School” of John Ashbery and others, this book reveals a taste that is essentially academic–even though New York City poetry differs from, say, Iowa City poetry in having scant connection to universities. What’s also missing from this anthology is nearly all poetry written in New York, about New York, in languages other than English. The book includes a selection from Federico Garcia Lorca and another, less distinguished, from Wislawa Szymborska, who copped a Nobel Prize several years ago; but “Poems of New York” has nothing in Russian (such as a Vladimir Mayakovsky classic), nothing from the Yiddish, nothing initially in Italian. If the bane of public poetry in this country is sentimental personal prefaces designed to inflate the poem to be read, this anthology is the first to demonstrate the contagious disease affecting poetry editing: “I began collecting the poems in the anthology just after the September 11 attack on The World Trade Center–an attack I witnessed with my family, neighbors, and strangers from the stoop of my building in lower Manhattan.” Under-edited, “Poems of New York” was also under-conceived, perhaps because it comes from a series clumsily entitled “Library Pocket Poets,” where the other volumes are: “Marriage Poems,” “On Wings of Song: Poems About Birds,” “Prayers,” “Poems of the Sea,” and “Zen Poems.” Put in the same class as birds and Zen, New York City barely escapes alive. –Richard Kostelanetz The Salmon of Doubt Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams Harmony, 288 pp., $24 If you know that the answer to the question of the meaning of life is forty-two, then you know the works of Douglas Adams. With his five-part Hitchhiker “trilogy” and radio series, two Dirk Gently novels, various journalistic dabblings and multimedia projects, Adams was an enormous success in the field of comic science fiction before his death last year at age 49. The Salmon of Doubt, however, is a sad attempt to claim Adams as a serious writer. Three prologues and an epilogue by various authors sandwich a smattering of essays, interviews, sketches, and an attempted salvage job of his final novel-in-progress. Nicholas Wroe insists, “The second Dirk Gently novel can easily be read as being about people who are homeless, displaced, and alienated from society.” Adams’s longtime editor Sue Firestone chimes in that his social criticism “is usually buried by the comedy, but it’s there if you want to find it.” Though these fans want to paint Adams retroactively as a novelist of ideas, his whole approach “to life, the universe, and everything” saw seriousness as detrimental to creativity and fun. His books are packed with ideas, but he uses them to set up gags, propel the story, and spread a sort of geeky but pleasing veneer over his stories. His atheism could be off-putting, but he wasn’t a bigot. Adams didn’t suffer from the conceit that people were reading his books because of his ideology, and so, for the most part, he checked it at the door. The Hitchhiker series is a genuinely odd, quirky, comic masterpiece. –Jeremy Lott
