"The Hungry Ear - Poems of Food &amp - Drink," Kevin Young, Editor - NYTimes.com "Take away this pudding," Winston Churchill reportedly said. It has no theme. I can understand Churchill's hilarious pique. It's how I often feel about poetry and about food writing. Both can be thin and flavorless. Both can be puddings without themes. Combine dining and verse, as has been done in a new anthology called "The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink," and you have the potential for a perfect storm of muckiness. The good news about "The Hungry Ear," edited by Kevin Young, the talented, prolific and sometimes sloppy poet, isn't that it sidesteps bad poetry (it doesn't), but that it also delivers such a groaning board of things to love, from Seamus Heaney on oysters and Lucille Clifton on collard greens to Theodore Roethke on root cellars and Jane Kenyon on shopping at an IGA. In Kenyon's wonderful poem her narrator walks the dingy supermarket aisles in Franklin, N.H., while thinking: Things would have been different if I hadn't let Bob climb on top of me for ninety seconds in 1979. There are 158 poems about food and drink in "The Hungry Ear." This volume is easily the best bathroom book of 2012, no small praise. There should be a National Book Award in this category. It's surprising that no one has thought to do an anthology like this before. Getting to the good material, though, is like working your way to the heart of an artichoke. There are tasty things along the way, but you'll be shedding a lot of inedible bits. There are many lines like this one from Mary Swander's "Ode to Okra": "Heal me with the nod of your leaves." Persevere. Mr. Young reprints the entirety of Howard Nemerov's "Bacon & Eggs": "The chicken contributes,/But the pig gives his all." He gives us Thomas Lux's delirious poem about his childhood refrigerator in 1957, with maraschino cherries as "fiery globes, like strippers/at a church social." There's Billy Collins, feeling sorry for the fish he is about to consume, "yanked from the sea and now lying dead/next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh." And there is Honorée Jeffers, winsome on barbecue: Don't ever trust white folk to cook your meat until it's done to the bone. Allen Ginsberg's ecstatic "Supermarket in California" utterly scatters whatever hush might build up: "Whole families/shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados,/ babies in the tomatoes! Ginsberg and Tom Wolfe should have dueled with exclamation points at 10 paces. Several of the best poems here are vinegary; they cut against the mellow grain. Judith Ortiz Cofer's "Beans: An Apologia for Not Loving to Cook" strikes me as a small anti-food classic. Ms. Cofer grew to hate "the cloying smell of boiling beans" because it was, to her childhood sense of things, the smell of women waiting, and the smell of women turning away from children's "demands for attention and love." I've been poking though a prepublication copy of "The Hungry Ear" for a few months now, and I've been glad to have it in my house. But it has also, like a guest who fills the refrigerator with 64-ounce bottles of Pepsi, made me crazy. It's an editorial anti-master class. Mr. Young is a young poet and editor who sometimes seems to be working so fast that he, as the state police sometimes say about people who crash their cars into trees in the fog, overdrives his headlights. His introduction to this volume, as is his introduction to a new collection of Lucille Clifton's poems that he co-edited, is upbeat and celebratory but also talky and facile. In "The Hungry Ear" Mr. Young tells us nothing about his editorial process. Why and how did he choose the poems that are here? Why do so few of them predate the 20th century? You don't have to print the Franklin's section of the prologue to "The Canterbury Tales," for example (the sauces were "poignant and sharp") in a book like this one, but it would be nice to know why canonical works aren't included. There is a typo in this book's fourth poem, Robert Hass's lovely "Meditation at Lagunitas." A "thin wire of grief" becomes a "think wire of grief." This is not worth remarking upon perhaps. But there are no typos in the four poems of his own that Mr. Young includes, which is more than anyone else except Campbell McGrath and Kenyon, each of whom also has four. It's easy to bully an anthologist for not including one's favorites. But no Ogden Nash? "Parsley/ Is gharsely." No Ira Gershwin? "You like potato and I like po-tah-to". No appearance of Randall Jarrell's classic "Next Day," which begins: "Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,/I take a box/And add it to my wild rice." No "When Dean Young Talks About Wine," by Tony Hoagland, the best wine poem ever written? And where's Jim Harrison? He is, no question, America's lustiest eater-poet. Some of the poems that are missing from "The Hungry Ear" would have brought more wit to the feast. The volume might have ended with "The Heart Attack," by Frederick Seidel. Or even better, with "The Beautiful Bowel Movement," by John Updike. What a great meal this book mostly is. What heartburn it provides. The Books of The Times review on Monday, about the anthology "The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink," edited by Kevin Young, misspelled the surname of the poet whose "Meditation at Lagunitas" is included in the book. He is Robert Hass, not Haas.