The Yale Review

1 6 0 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R ‘‘This is a book for anyone,’’ this book begins, but later, more narrowly: ‘‘This is a poet’s book and a book about poets.’’ And between them, most narrowly: Because some of you I’m trying to reach. Who’ve written a few poems but have no idea how they did or why, who’ve not yet considered those things. I’m trying to reach those whose poems I didn’t judge in a few seconds – or I did, but I judged them worth the candle. . . . I’m trying to reach you before your mind’s made up, before you’ve decided – before you’ve done a damn thing – how the damn thing is done. Before you’re a something-ist or swear by something-ism. . . . Before you’ve decided which long-gone poets were wrong all along, or which new kid on the block has been dead for centuries. O n P o e t r y , by Glyn Maxwell (Oberon Books, 176 pp., $23.95) O n e T h o u s a n d N i g h t s a n d C o u n t i n g : S e l e c t e d P o e m s , by Glyn Maxwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $17 paper) 1 6 1 R At di√erent times, each of these claims is accurate, but I think that the last one comes closest to defining the audience Glyn Maxwell envisions for most of On Poetry. A nifty hip-pocket size (5 x 7∞ ⁄≤ inches and 176 pages), it is a singular vade mecum for a young poet spending her summer after graduation among the Greek islands, keeping a journal, writing some drafts, and musing on her upcoming year in an MFA program. It reads quickly, thanks to its author ’s mastery of both his craft and the vernacular, in addition to his wit, and his sly sense of humor, and his gusto, and it can and should be returned to several times in variously shaded settings and moods. A precocious high school graduate might also fall for it, and some poets who are ambitious teachers will assign it gratefully . It is engaging from the get-go, lucidly rebarbative if you are a something-ist, lucidly bracing if you fancy you are not, and colorfully written at every turn. There are a number of books out there that will appear on the same shelf in a bookstore – or rather will be recommended on the same screen by Amazon. The only one that Maxwell refers to by name, and approvingly, is John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason, that tour de force of self-exemplifying definitions (a sestina elucidating the sestina, a pantoum characterizing a pantoum, and so on). Other handbooks, compact and composed by poets (my criteria for appearing on the same screen or shelf), include Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide, Alfred Corn’s The Poem’s Heartbeat : A Manual of Prosody, and James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry. James McAuley’s acute but obscure Versification: A Short Introduction is prickly, the sort of thing that might be loved by the poetic version of Harlow’s monkeys, while Lewis Turco’s New Book of Forms, like Philip Hobsbaum’s Metre, Rhythm, and Verse Form, can be fruitfully consulted within its tight parameters but not really read, and exhaustive studies like Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification and Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry are too large for a provident backpacker, not to mention insu≈ciently hip for a pocket. What distinguishes Maxwell’s volume is its charmingly unique integration of disparate discursive elements, the first of which is his division of parts. He understands that you cannot teach or learn much about writing or reading poems in a methodical fashion . You cannot, for instance, begin...