A book on what poems have to offer

My review on Bookwyrm: The wordplay in the title refers to "poetry" as a label as opposed to individual poems, which the author fully believes to hold keys to understand other people's humanity, their feelings, and their roles in their communities. Poems can be easy to understand or difficult, they can depict scenes from life or idiosyncratic internal experiences. They can play with sound, crib from other writers, allude to popular culture, or use tricks of form to conceal or enhance meaning. "Poetry" is so broad it cannot be confined to any single practice.ctice.

The book is packed with examples from antiquity to the last few years and the close reading of these is what powers the discussion. Lots of the poets chosen for these examples were new to me as a reader. The style of the book was light, easy to read, without stuffiness. The author drew inspiration from the classic book by critic William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity in the way she quoted poems to emphasize the points she made, though I think she pulled it off with considerably more elegance. (I read that book back in 2010.) I would recommend this book for a person who felt really motivated to understand what poetry is for and how poets are innovating in our time.