The Best American Poetry 1989, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor Donald Hall.
One of the poems Hall selected for this edition was written by his wife,[1] Jane Kenyon. Hall also selected one of his own poems as one of the 75 best American poems of the year.
| Poet | Poem | Where poem previously appeared |
| "Anxiety's Prosody" | Poetry | |
| "Meanwhile..." | Mudfish | |
| "Northern Idylls" | The Gettysburg Review | |
| "It is marvellous..." | American Poetry Review | |
| "My Father at 85" | Common Ground | |
| "Twins of Gazelle Which Feed Among the Lilies" | ||
| "Of the Knowledge of God and Evil" | The New Yorker | |
| "What I Heard at the Discount Department Store" | Longhouse | |
| "Hotel Tropicana" | Epoch | |
| "A Minor Tremor" | Boulevard | |
| "For Robert Duncan" | Exquisite Corpse (magazine) | |
| "Paris..." | o•blék | |
| "True Solar Holiday" | The Yale Review | |
| "Age" | New American Writing | |
| "Letter from the Poetry Editor" | The New Criterion | |
| "The Reading" | The Volcano Inside | |
| "The Late Notebooks of Albrecht Durer" | The Gettysburg Review | |
| "Letting the Puma Go" | Poetry | |
| "The Rabbit Story" | Willow Springs | |
| "The Rivals" | The Paris Review | |
| "A Date with Robbe-Grillet" | New American Writing | |
| "BW" | Western Humanities Review | |
| "Powers of Congress" | The Atlantic Monthly | |
| "Voyage" | Grand Street | |
| "In Violet" | The Gettysburg Review | |
| "A Dark Thing Inside the Day" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Cafeteria in Boston" | The Times Literary Supplement | |
| "History" | The New Yorker | |
| "Kinneret" | Harp Lake | |
| "Twenty-five (from The Novel)" | New American Writing | |
| "The Good Reason for Our Forgetting" | Partisan Review | |
| "Heat Lightning in a Time of Drought" | The Georgia Review | |
| "Every Day There Are New Memos" | The Georgia Review | |
| "An Awful Lot Was Happening" | Poetry | |
| "Dance Lessons of the Thirties" | The New Criterion | |
| "Getting Dressed in the Dark" | The New York Review of Books | |
| "Three Songs at the End of Summer" | Poetry | |
| "Six Hamlets" | One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays | |
| "The Ransom" | Grand Street | |
| "Dog Poem" | The Gettysburg Review | |
| "Teste Moanial" | Exquisite Corpse | |
| "Condo Auction" | The Paris Review | |
| "Kidnapped" | The New Yorker | |
| "Showing Us the Fields" | Boulevard | |
| "The Fifties" | The Hudson Review | |
| "The Abandonment" | The Atlantic Monthly | |
| "A Room at the Heart of Things" | The Inner Room | |
| "The Warmth of Hot Chocolate" | Epoch | |
| "The Wellspring" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Some Questions You Might Ask" | Harvard Magazine | |
| "The Bridge of Sighs" | The Atlantic Monthly | |
| "Sun" | Sun | |
| "Movie" | Captive Audience | |
| "At Pleasure Bay" | Raritan | |
| "Sappho Comments on an Exhibition of Expressionist Landscapes" | Sulfur | |
| "The Shoebox" | The Paris Review | |
| "Valetino's Hair" | The Reaper | |
| "Trappings" | Shenandoah | |
| "The Lost Golf Ball" | House (Blown Apart) | |
| "Tennyson" | The New Yorker | |
| "The White Room" | Western Humanities Review | |
| "The People Next Door" | Poetry | |
| "The Memory of Cock Robin Dwarfs W. D." | Michigan Quarterly Review | |
| "Building" | Witness | |
| "Sunday Afternoon at Fulham Palace" | Iowa Review | |
| "Broken Gauges" | Green Mountains Review | |
| "Last Day" | The Ohio Review | |
| "Reading the Facts about Frost in The Norton Anthology" | Poetry | |
| "Movie" | The New York Review of Books | |
| "Reading in Place" | Grand Street | |
| "Harvest, 1925" | Seneca Review | |
| "Trust Me" | Boulevard | |
| "Lying" | New and Collected Poems | |
| "The Muse of Distance" | The Muse of Distance | |
| "Madrid" | The Yale Review | |