'Books of 2007' from http://poetry.about.com/

Top Picks - Poetry Picks: The Best Books of 2007 from your Poetry Guide

Selected by Poetry Guide Bob Holman.... This was Alice Notley's Year -- we just called it 2007, but two of her books entered the world this year. And two big books on two big but generally overlooked Heroes of the Beats, Helen Adam and Philip Whalen, made a deliciously illogical sense in this, the Year of the Continuing Break-down of US Democracy.

1) Grave of Light: New & Selected Poems 1970-2005, by Alice Notley
(Wesleyan University Press, 2006) Not only did two of Alice Notley's books come into the world this year -- it's also the year that the Academy of American Poetry saw fit to award the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize to an expat poet in Paris who figured out how to do it (write the poems to change gravity) as an "experimental third generation New York School poet." No doubt Grave of Light is the best intro to the incredible range of Notley, from the breezy, Berriganish early work to the genuinely bizarre form and astonishing political/folk epic content of The Descent of Alette to the dense mysterious prose-po combo found in the recent Disobedience and Alma. It's like sailing a mirror, a gloss on the moss.

2) In the Pines, by Alice Notley
(Penguin Group USA, 2007) Grave of Light is the best place for readers new to Notley to begin... But for me, it's the amazing trip of In the Pines that squeals the wheel. Notley has never steered away from the hard parts, but never before has she dared the Reader to join her in seeing just how much pain one can endure, how much beauty one can stand. There is no one else in literature whose voice moves so deeply inside you, and moves things so deeply inside you, as you read. Book of the Year, poet of the age, Alice Notley.

3) A Helen Adam Reader, edited by Kristin Prevallet
(National Poetry Foundation, 2007) Adam (1910 - 1993), a tiny Scottish figure, the Den Mother of the Beats, wrote primarily in a jangly, Scots ballad style, often contemporized: "Goodbye transcendent Tompkins Square / I haven't long to stay. / A double jolt of heroin and I'll be on my way..." And always with a veneer of myth, generally Egyptian. But Prevallet is not content with these generalities, and uncovers in Adam not only the odd woman out of the Beat movement, but an extraordinary outsider artist, a cohort of Duncan's, a precursor of performance poetry, a genuine eccentric, and a poet to be reckoned with. This book is an incredible achievement.