review 1: What a wonderful book on poetry. Glyn Maxwell is that amazing rarity, a poetic critic of poetry. Love for his subject permeates each page: affection for his students (from the Dickinsonite to the postmodernist); poets like Yeats and Thomas; the white and black of poetry itself.Maxwell is very interesting in his discussion of form and, of course, time. For him, time is what poetry is about; the line-breaks, the breaths, the shape of the poem on the page. And he's right, really. Poems must be solar, lunar, musical and visual. Deeper, words themselves must "mean right, sound right, look right, fit right" so that "the poem is not only you, it's you and the language. It's not only you and today, it's you and time." I think that's a lovely thought and one I'll strive to hold ont... moreo. Because Maxwell is right. What's the point of labelling 'assonance' and 'caesura'? Words will always form a pattern. Each chain of words, each line break and comma, is there for a particular reason. It seems trivial to pick out one instance. A pause is a pause, no matter its form. Which brings me to another of Maxwell's main points: poetry must have form, even 'free verse'. Now, I've been reading Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets lately, so I must say I agree. There is a 'pulse' in these poems - they are led by A form, even if it isn't THE form of old. Same with Eliot and modernism: poetry classed as free verse is littered with iambic pentameter and heartbeat. Even the difference of day/ night, Maxwell suggests, is a form (I suppose the very difference between black and white on paper could be seen as a form, but that' probably going too far). TS Eliot argues that you can't cast off 'tradition', but you adapt it. The canon has a certain elasticity in 'tradition': I definitely think this applies to form, and I think Maxwell does too. (How do you even write poetry with no sense of rhyme or rhythm? My own poetry isn't usually in a specified 'form', but I'm hypersensitive to such things!)Time always passes; poetry is often about the "winged chariot", or even Ned Stowey's cart going "clickety-clack" (of course time can go clickety-clack, if you're a horse!) so why wouldn't you be aware of it on a structural as well as a conceptual level?It feels like there's so much contained in this little book that I want to go back and reread it to pick up some more. I do think, though, after this reading I'll be much more aware of the "white" against the black and how time works in poetry.Couple of sidenotes: loved the image of the white space 'eating' song lyrics. Next time someone asks me about the difference between songs and poems, that analogy is coming out to play. Also I loved the creative exercises which I'll experiment with when I have time! (The card game trick and the 'translation game' will fill the next rainy afternoon...) The one single fact that will stay with me from this book, though, is that 'stanza' means 'room' in its original Italian. I'll never think of poetic stanzas the same way again. review 2: There are so many books "About" poetry: how to read, how to write, what not to read, what fashions to follow: books that make ludicrous claims for the power of the poem,books to inoculate the idiot reader against the ideological viruses carried by this or that poem. Books about poetry outsell books of poems.This one is magical. It does not hide the difficulty of writing a good poem or the pleasures of reading a good one. It gives good advice on both, but in a way that credits readers with enough intelligence to think for themselves. If you only read one book About Poetry, I'd recommend this one. less
