Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry
As its title implies, Stephen Dobyns's rigorous collection of essays about  poetry celebratesColeridge's  dictum that poetry is the best words in the best order. Dobyns's probing examinations of  the elements of poetry--metaphor, pacing, tone--and his study of the evolution of free  verse are not for Sunday-sunset versifiers. They are strenuous, meaty, and wholly  satisfying fare, intended for serious students of poetry. Dobyns, the author of eight  volumes of poetry (and 17 novels), believes, likeBaudelaire, that  "each poem ... has an optimum number of words [and] an optimum number of  pieces of information ... and to go over or under even by one word weakens the  whole." Poetry, he says, belongs to the reader, not the writer, and as readers,  "at the close of the poem, we must not only feel that our expectations have been  met but that our lives have been increased, if only to a small degree." And, if that's  not challenge enough for the writer, add to it "that the conclusion of a given piece  must appear both inevitable and surprising." The final third of the book comprises  chapters on four writers, each of whom represents to Dobyns an ideal in poetry:Rainer Maria  Rilke, who Dobyns says worked harder than any other poet to develop and change  his work;Osip  Mandelstam, an exemplar of moral centeredness;Anton Chekhov, for his  sense of personal freedom; andYannis Ritsos, for his  "sense of the mystery that surrounds us."