The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
The Making of a Poemis among the best how-to-read-poetry  titles. Edited by two of our greatest living poets, one Irish and  female, the other American and male, it is both an exploration of poetic  forms and an anthology. Eavan Boland and Mark Strand each offer an  introduction and then give us a series of chapters devoted to particular  verse forms--the sonnet, the ballad, the sestina, the villanelle, blank  verse, the stanza--as well as a long section devoted to what they  somewhat vaguely call shaping forms. This refers to poetic structures  established not by a specific rhyme and/or metrical pattern but by  content: the elegy, for example, or the pastoral or ode. The book then  concludes with a section on open forms. Each chapter is conveniently  subdivided, each topic simply defined: a single page gives "The Ballad  at a Glance" (or, for that matter, the pantoum) as a quick overview of  the form's structure. A page or two on the history of the form follows,  along with a brief comment on "the contemporary context." Then a  chronological anthology of poems demonstrates the particular form. In  the sonnet's case, for instance, we are treated to 23 brilliantly chosen  examples--everything from Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a  summer's day?" to Seamus Heaney's "The Haw Lantern" to Mary Jo Salter's  playful "Half a Double Sonnet." The section then concludes with another  brief analysis of one example. In this spot, the villanelle features  Elizabeth Bishop's classic heartbreaker, "One Art," and blank verse  gives us far too brief a take on Robert Frost's tantalizing "Directive."  Itself worth the price of admission, the poem begins:Back out of all this now too much for us,Back in a time made simply by the lossof detail, burned, dissolved, and broken offLike graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,There is a house that is no more than a houseUpon a farm that is no more than a farmAnd in a town that is no more than a town.One can readily see both the advantages and the limitations of such a  format: definitions are kept lean, at times approaching the sound bite,  and the short sentences and brief paragraphs often seem designed for a  readership more accustomed to journalism than to the complexities of  Dante (see, for example, the one-page history of the sestina). All of  this looks like an attempt to reach an audience of both college students  and general readers. While more information might help (brief comments  on why certain poems in the anthology are defined as odes, pastorals, or  elegies, for example), the bottom line is thatThe Making of a  Poemdoes an excellent job of taking the inexperienced reader inside  the mystery of poetic form. In these terms the volume succeeds, giving  us a way into the history of poetry, along with an excellent anthology  as a starting point for a deeper exploration of the glories of the  genre.--Doug Thorpe