The present revised edition of Texas in Poetry updates and expands Billy Bob Hill's 1994 edition, which received excellent reviews and was sold out within two years of publication. In that volume Hill made it clear that the anthology was not a collection of the best that has been written in this state or about this state. His purpose then was to present a full and representative selection of the poetry just a few years after the sesquicentennial of Texas independence; in fact, the full title of the first edition is Texas in Poetry: A 150-Year Anthology. This edition, now eight years after the first edition, has the same goals--to give the reader a sampling of Texas poetry from the earliest times to the present. In this second edition, he could have eliminated many of the older works in favor of modern Texas verse that compares favorably with anything being written in the country today. But that would have gone against his standard for the first edition, for to give a full picture of Texas in poetry it is necessary to keep those poems that are by today's standards mawkish, amateurish, and oftentimes embarrassing to lovers of poetry. But they do represent the thoughts and language of a time when the state was in its infancy. And even before. Back to the years when the state was warring for independence. Back to the nascent republic hoping for admission to the Union.

But since so much that is first-rate is included, most of the poems in this large and definitive collection are works that will stand comparison with best writing in the mainstream of American poetry. In fact, both editions are filled with excellent poems by writers recognized across the country as accomplished craftsmen. Writers like Vassar Miller, Walter McDonald, R. S. Gwynn, Betsy Feagan Colquitt, Betty Adcock, Pattiann Rogers, William Barney, Lorenzo Thomas, Cynthia Macdonald, Edward Hirsch, William Virgil Davis, Jack Myers, Robert Phillips, Ray Gonzalez, Thomas Whitbread, James Hoggard, Jerry Bradley, Naomi Shihab Nye, Del Marie Rogers, and Sandra Cisneros are all writers well know in contemporary American poetry. And there are many other poets included here who are making names for themselves as this edition goes to press. I have in mind talented writers like nia akimbo, Isabel Nathaniel, Rosemary Catacalos, Jas. Mardis, Palmer Hall, Robert Fink, Carmen Tafolla, Teresa Paloma Acosta, Carol Coffee Reposa, Jerry Craven, Sherry Craven, Tim Seibels, Harryette Mullen, Cynthia Harper, Njoki McElroy, Chip Dameron, and Carol Culler. Needless to say, I have not named all the fine Texas poets, and I am sure my omissions will haunt me even before the book goes to press. But they are here in this volume and all add immeasurably to the picture of Texas poetry as it stands at the beginning of a new millennium.

Nor has Hill forgotten those poets who began making poetry from Texas noticed across the nation, poets who founded the Texas Poetry Society and nurtured Texas verse during the 1920s and '30s and '40s when Texas poetry was almost always derided as doggerel about bluebonnets and cattle. But those serious poets of the poetry society paved the way for writers as sophisticated as those writing in Texas today. In those early hard days, Karle Wilson Baker, Whitney Montgomery, W. E. Bard, Lexie Dean Robertson, Grace Noll Crowell, Berta Hart Nance, Faye Yauger, Gene Shuford, Vaida Stewart Montgomery, Arthur M. Sampley, Hilton Ross Greer, and Stanley E. Babb kept Texas poetry alive and smoothed a path for today's best writers.

In order to give a sense of the scope of verse in Texas, Hill has wisely included works by such barely recognized poets as Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic; Bonnie Parker, the notorious bank robber whose contribution is a long bit of doggerel about the killers Bonnie and Clyde; and W. Lee O'Daniel, whose Lightcrust Doughboys were hillbilly radio stars in the 1930s (O'Daniel wrote "Beautiful Texas" before going on to be governor and a U. S. Senator--though he was undistinguished in all his pursuits). There is even Sam Houston's "A Texian's Call to Arms" from 1836. And certainly Hill has not neglected to include one of the "great bad" poems of all time, "Lasca"--remember the line "Scratches don't count in Texas/Down by the Rio Grande"? Not to mention Berta Hart Nance's now-unfashionable poem "Cattle" with its memorable (?) lines "Other states were carved or born/ Texas grew from hide and horn."

One of the interesting things about Texas in Poetry is that editor Hill has divided the poems into recognizable themes about life in the Lone Star State. And he has chosen for his subtitles the names of some celebrated works about Texas. His first chapter is called "I'll Take Texas," a title borrowed from Mary Lasswell's memoir about her return to the state from New York. His final chapter is borrowed from the Reverend C. C. White's wonderful dictated autobiography, "No Quittin' Sense." Some of the other title divisions come from A. C. Greene's A Personal Country, William A. Owens's This Stubborn Soil, and George Sessions Perry's Texas: A World in Itself. There are eleven sections, and one of the ways to read the book is to start at the beginning and read all the poems in each section before moving on. But it is also instructive to read here and there in the book as one does in any general anthology. I have done it both ways. When the first edition was published, I was director of the Center for Texas Studies at the University of North Texas and was, in a way, the book's publisher. But since I didn't edit it or proofread it, I read it piecemeal. This time around, as an editor and proofreader at TCU Press, I read the entire manuscript from start to finish and saw, for the first time, how intelligent and interesting Hill's divisions are. I recommend reading the book from cover to cover the way one should attack Byron's Don Juan or any novel. For classroom use, such an approach will never sell, and the piecemeal approach will repay the reader almost equally well. I find that I am more impressed with the second edition than the first because of the way I read it this time around--and also because Hill has discovered many new poems and new poets.

Hill admits in an earlier preface that he did not include all the poems that he could have, and that is even truer now than it was in 1994. Now, an anthologist could produce a volume of Texas poetry that would include none of the poems from a time past when poetry in this state was still derivative and untutored and simplistic to human eye and ear. But, admirable though such a volume would be, it would not serve the purpose that Hill had in mind when he put together the first edition. I have no doubt that Billy Bob Hill, probably the most comprehensive and knowledgeable observer of Texas poetry we have, could--and may--produce such a volume. But it will not supersede his outstanding Texas in Poetry.

Excerpt from Texas in Poetry Copyright © 2002 by Billy Bob Hill. No portion of this excerpt may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, Texas Christian University Press.