poetry review essays

How To Write A Poetry Review

Poetry reviewing is a vital part of the poetry ecosystem. but many poetry fans never write (or even read) poetry criticism, so today we’re introducing you to the art form of the poetry review., in 2022, young poets network collaborated with the prestigious t. s. eliot prize to run a young critics scheme in which ten 18-25 year olds took part in a mentoring programme and created video reviews of the shortlisted books in the 2022 t. s. eliot prize., you can also discover fifteen top tips from fifteen leading critics here .

What is a poetry review?

A poetry review is a text that tells the reader about a poetry book or performance. It explores how well that work succeeded in what it was trying to do. In it, the reviewer offers their own thoughts and feelings about the work they’re reviewing. In the best reviews, those thoughts and feelings are backed up by proof in the work – quotations, references, examples. Unlike an academic essay, reviews are generally written for the general public.

Why do people read poetry reviews?

Sometimes, it’s to see if they’d like to read this poetry book/see this performance (etc.). Sometimes, it’s to hear someone else’s response to something they’ve already read/seen. Other times, people might want to know a bit more about a certain poet’s work or what they’re up to. Reviews can also make wider points about poetry, and so sometimes people read reviews just to read about poetry.

Why do people write poetry reviews?

Writing a poetry review is a chance to spend some quality time with a text/performance, and to really think about your response to it and why you feel that way. It’s a chance not only to learn about a poet’s work and why they’re doing what they’re doing, but also to learn about your own taste, prejudices and preferences. It’s also an opportunity to share your thoughts and have them taken seriously by other readers, and to enter into a wider conversation around poetry.

Where are poetry reviews published?

Of course we recommend you subscribe to The Poetry Review and other magazines – but if you can’t afford to, visit your local library. The National Poetry Library in London, Scottish Poetry Library and Manchester Poetry Library all have a great selection of magazines you can peruse for free. Many poetry magazines publish some of their reviews online too, such as The Poetry Review , Poetry London and Magma .

How do I write a poetry book review?

Everyone’s process is different. We’ve put together a few essential ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s below, and we’ve also asked some leading poetry critics for their thoughts and shared them here !

If you’re reviewing a performance, your preparation may be a little different, but the general advice below may still be helpful.

And finally, as with any art form: if you’re going to write a review, you should be reading reviews too. Take note of what you like and don’t like in other people’s work, and think about what you will carry forward into your own practice and what will you leave behind.

When preparing to write your review, do:

• Read the book carefully , at least twice if you can.
• Underline and take notes as you go!
• Research the poet and the book’s context, and read what else they’ve written. You might not end up writing about this in your review, but it will give you the confidence to say ‘X is a theme in their work’. You might also like to read interviews the poet has given and other people’s reviews of their previous work. And it’s important to fully understand the tradition the book is situated in and the references it’s making.

When writing the review, do:

• Use the word count to structure your review. If an editor asks you for 600 words, don’t send them 1,000! It’s good to think about this when you’re planning your review. You can’t fit much more than a summary and a judgement in 200 words. But in 1,000 words, you can really go into particular moments and themes, and include more quotations from the work. If you haven’t been given a word count, around 600-800 words is a standard amount.
• Include examples and quotations from the book, wherever possible. You can’t expect a reader to believe your argument if you don’t give them evidence! Letting them hear the poet’s own words is also arguably the best way for your reader to get a feel of the book.
• Remember your audience. Be clear, engaging and generous to your reader. What else can you assume they will have read/watched/seen, and what do you need to explain?
• Send your review on time! Editors keep tight schedules.

Some questions:

• Consider the themes (big ideas like migration, fatherhood or love) and motifs (if they keep writing about dogs, why?). Have they explored the themes enough, in your opinion? What would you have liked to see, if not?
• Consider the overall structure of the book. Is it divided up into sections, and why? Does that work? Why is it ordered in the way it is? Is it chronological, or does it mark some kind of progression (or regression)? Does it feel well paced?
• If you have enough space to do so in your review, consider the construction of individual poems . Do they keep using the same device or form over and over? Does that work? Are they using gaps and spacing in an interesting way? How does that tie into the poet’s themes and aims?
• Question your own prejudices and assumptions . Are you making any grand statements? Make sure you’re backing them up with proof from the text.
• Go way over or under the word count. The editor has given you that number for a reason, and may simply not publish your review if you ignore it.
• Send off your first draft without editing it! This should go without saying. Leave it for a few days, then come back to it with fresh eyes.
• Negatively review a book for the sake of it! You wouldn’t like someone else to do that to your book, so don’t do it to someone else’s.
• Get personal. If you want to talk about something other than the text, such as the poet’s biography, think carefully about whether you’re making any assumptions.
• Review books of people who you have a close personal relationship with . The poetry world is small, so this can be hard and there are no clear-cut lines here. But you don’t want to feel forced to review something positively just because it’s your friend – and equally, you don’t want to hurt your relationship with them over a poetry review!
• Be afraid to be critical . As long as you’re reviewing the work fairly, on its own terms, and backing up what you’re saying with evidence from the text, poets are generally happy to have anyone engaging deeply with their work, and will be grateful for your close attention.

Our top tip for reviewing poetry

The most important piece of advice is of all to read and review the work on its own terms . If you’re reviewing a book of sonnets and you personally aren’t a fan of the form, try and put your own taste to one side and think: why has the poet chosen to write in this form? Have they been successful in what they were setting out to do? Where has your taste come from, and is there a valid critical reason behind your gut reaction? And if you can’t see past your dislike, you don’t have to review it! Reviewing should ultimately be a fun, creative process – so if you’re not having fun, why not try another text?

And discover fifteen more top tips from fifteen leading reviewers here .

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Poetry Explained

How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)

Unlock success in poetry essays with our comprehensive guide. Uncover the process to help aid understanding of how best to create a poetry essay.

While many of us read poetry for pleasure, it is undeniable that many poetry readers do so in the knowledge that they will be assessed on the text they are reading, either in an exam, for homework, or for a piece of coursework. This is clearly a daunting task for many, and lots of students don’t even know where to begin. We’re here to help! This guide will take you through all the necessary steps so that you can plan and write great poetry essays every time. If you’re still getting to grips with the different techniques, terms, or some other aspect of poetry, then check out our other available resources at the bottom of this page.

This Guide was Created by Joe Samantaria

Degree in English and Related Literature, and a Masters in Irish Literature

Upon completion of his degrees, Joe is an English tutor and counts W.B. Yeats , Emily Brontë , and Federico Garcia Lorca among his favorite poets. He has helped tutor hundreds of students with poetry and aims to do the same for readers and Poetry + users on Poem Analysis.

How to Write a Poetry Essay

• 1 Before You Start…
• 2 Introductions
• 3 Main Paragraphs
• 4 Conclusions
• 6 Other Resources

Before You Start…

Before we begin, we must address the fact that all poetry essays are different from one another on account of different academic levels, whether or not the essay pertains to one poem or multiple, and the intended length of the essay. That is before we even contend with the countless variations and distinctions between individual poems. Thus, it is impossible to produce a single, one-size-fits-all template for writing great essays on poetry because the criteria for such an essay are not universal. This guide is, therefore, designed to help you go about writing a simple essay on a single poem, which comes to roughly 1000-1200 words in length. We have designed it this way to mirror the requirements of as many students around the world as possible. It is our intention to write another guide on how to write a comparative poetry essay at a later date. Finally, we would like to stress the fact that this guide is exactly that: a guide. It is not a set of restrictive rules but rather a means of helping you get to grips with writing poetry essays. Think of it more like a recipe that, once practiced a few times, can be modified and adapted as you see fit.

The first and most obvious starting point is the poem itself and there are some important things to do at this stage before you even begin contemplating writing your essay. Naturally, these things will depend on the nature of the essay you are required to write.

• Is the poem one you are familiar with?
• Do you know anything about the context of the poem or the poet?
• How much time do you have to complete the essay?
• Do you have access to books or the internet?

These questions matter because they will determine the type, length, and scope of the essay you write. Naturally, an essay written under timed conditions about an unfamiliar poem will look very different from one written about a poem known to you. Likewise, teachers and examiners will expect different things from these essays and will mark them accordingly.

As this article pertains to writing a poverty essay, we’re going to assume you have a grasp of the basics of understanding the poems themselves. There is a plethora of materials available that can help you analyze poetry if you need to, and thousands of analyzed poems are available right here. For the sake of clarity, we advise you to use these tools to help you get to grips with the poem you intend to write about before you ever sit down to actually produce an essay. As we have said, the amount of time spent pondering the poem will depend on the context of the essay. If you are writing a coursework-style question over many weeks, then you should spend hours analyzing the poem and reading extensively about its context. If, however, you are writing an essay in an exam on a poem you have never seen before, you should perhaps take 10-15% of the allotted time analyzing the poem before you start writing.

The Question

Once you have spent enough time analyzing the poem and identifying its key features and themes, you can turn your attention to the question. It is highly unlikely that you will simply be asked to “analyze this poem.” That would be too simple on the one hand and far too broad on the other.

More likely, you will be asked to analyze a particular aspect of the poem, usually pertaining to its message, themes, or meaning. There are numerous ways examiners can express these questions, so we have outlined some common types of questions below.

• Explore the poet’s presentation of…
• How does the poet present…
• Explore the ways the writer portrays their thoughts about…

These are all similar ways of achieving the same result. In each case, the examiner requires that you analyze the devices used by the poet and attempt to tie the effect those devices have to the poet’s broader intentions or meaning.

Some students prefer reading the question before they read the poem, so they can better focus their analytical eye on devices and features that directly relate to the question they are being asked. This approach has its merits, especially for poems that you have not previously seen. However, be wary of focusing too much on a single element of a poem, particularly if it is one you may be asked to write about again in a later exam. It is no good knowing only how a poem links to the theme of revenge if you will later be asked to explore its presentation of time.

Essay plans can help focus students’ attention when they’re under pressure and give them a degree of confidence while they’re writing. In basic terms, a plan needs the following elements:

• An overarching answer to the question (this will form the basis of your introduction)
• A series of specific, identifiable poetic devices ( metaphors , caesura , juxtaposition , etc) you have found in the poem
• Ideas about how these devices link to the poem’s messages or themes.
• Some pieces of relevant context (depending on whether you need it for your type of question)

In terms of layout, we do not want to be too prescriptive. Some students prefer to bullet-point their ideas, and others like to separate them by paragraph. If you use the latter approach, you should aim for:

• 1 Introduction
• 4-5 Main paragraphs
• 1 Conclusion

Finally, the length and detail of your plan should be dictated by the nature of the essay you are doing. If you are under exam conditions, you should not spend too much time writing a plan, as you will need that time for the essay itself. Conversely, if you are not under time pressure, you should take your time to really build out your plan and fill in the details.

Introductions

If you have followed all the steps to this point, you should be ready to start writing your essay. All good essays begin with an introduction, so that is where we shall start.

When it comes to introductions, the clue is in the name: this is the place for you to introduce your ideas and answer the question in broad terms. This means that you don’t need to go into too much detail, as you’ll be doing that in the main body of the essay. That means you don’t need quotes, and you’re unlikely to need to quote anything from the poem yet. One thing to remember is that you should mention both the poet’s name and the poem’s title in your introduction. This might seem unnecessary, but it is a good habit to get into, especially if you are writing an essay in which other questions/poems are available to choose from.

As we mentioned earlier, you are unlikely to get a question that simply asks you to analyze a poem in its entirety, with no specific angle. More likely, you’ll be asked to write an essay about a particular thematic element of the poem. Your introduction should reflect this. However, many students fall into the trap of simply regurgitating the question without offering anything more. For example, a question might ask you to explore a poet’s presentation of love, memory, loss, or conflict . You should avoid the temptation to simply hand these terms back in your introduction without expanding upon them. You will get a chance to see this in action below.

Let’s say we were given the following question:

Explore Patrick Kavanagh’s presentation of loss and memory in Memory of My Father

Taking on board the earlier advice, you should hopefully produce an introduction similar to the one written below.

Patrick Kavanagh presents loss as an inescapable fact of existence and subverts the readers’ expectations of memory by implying that memories can cause immense pain, even if they feature loved ones. This essay will argue that Memory of My Father depicts loss to be cyclical and thus emphasizes the difficulties that inevitably occur in the early stages of grief.

As you can see, the introduction is fairly condensed and does not attempt to analyze any specific poetic elements. There will be plenty of time for that as the essay progresses. Similarly, the introduction does not simply repeat the words ‘loss’ and ‘memory’ from the question but expands upon them and offers a glimpse of the kind of interpretation that will follow without providing too much unnecessary detail at this early stage.

Main Paragraphs

Now, we come to the main body of the essay, the quality of which will ultimately determine the strength of our essay. This section should comprise of 4-5 paragraphs, and each of these should analyze an aspect of the poem and then link the effect that aspect creates to the poem’s themes or message. They can also draw upon context when relevant if that is a required component of your particular essay.

There are a few things to consider when writing analytical paragraphs and many different templates for doing so, some of which are listed below.

• PEE (Point-Evidence-Explain)
• PEA (Point-Evidence-Analysis)
• PETAL (Point-Evidence-Technique-Analysis-Link)
• IQA (Identify-Quote-Analyze)
• PEEL (Point-Evidence-Explain-Link)

Some of these may be familiar to you, and they all have their merits. As you can see, there are all effective variations of the same thing. Some might use different terms or change the order, but it is possible to write great paragraphs using all of them.

One of the most important aspects of writing these kind of paragraphs is selecting the features you will be identifying and analyzing. A full list of poetic features with explanations can be found here. If you have done your plan correctly, you should have already identified a series of poetic devices and begun to think about how they link to the poem’s themes.

It is important to remember that, when analyzing poetry, everything is fair game! You can analyze the language, structure, shape, and punctuation of the poem. Try not to rely too heavily on any single type of paragraph. For instance, if you have written three paragraphs about linguistic features ( similes , hyperbole , alliteration , etc), then try to write your next one about a structural device ( rhyme scheme , enjambment , meter , etc).

Regardless of what structure you are using, you should remember that multiple interpretations are not only acceptable but actively encouraged. Techniques can create effects that link to the poem’s message or themes in both complementary and entirely contrasting ways. All these possibilities should find their way into your essay. You are not writing a legal argument that must be utterly watertight – you are interpreting a subjective piece of art.

It is important to provide evidence for your points in the form of either a direct quotation or, when appropriate, a reference to specific lines or stanzas . For instance, if you are analyzing a strict rhyme scheme, you do not need to quote every rhyming word. Instead, you can simply name the rhyme scheme as, for example, AABB , and then specify whether or not this rhyme scheme is applied consistently throughout the poem or not. When you are quoting a section from the poem, you should endeavor to embed your quotation within your line so that your paragraph flows and can be read without cause for confusion.

When it comes to context, remember to check whether or not your essay question requires it before you begin writing. If you do need to use it, you must remember that it is used to elevate your analysis of the poem, not replace it. Think of context like condiments or spices. When used appropriately, they can enhance the experience of eating a meal, but you would have every right to complain if a restaurant served you a bowl of ketchup in lieu of an actual meal. Moreover, you should remember to only use the contextual information that helps your interpretation rather than simply writing down facts to prove you have memorized them. Examiners will not be impressed that you know the date a particular poet was born or died unless that information relates to the poem itself.

For the sake of ease, let’s return to our earlier question:

Have a look at the example paragraph below, taking note of the ways in which it interprets the linguistic technique in several different ways.

Kavanagh uses a metaphor when describing how the narrator ’s father had “fallen in love with death” in order to capture the narrator’s conflicted attitudes towards his loss. By conflating the ordinarily juxtaposed states of love and death, Kavanagh implies the narrator’s loss has shattered his previously held understanding of the world and left him confused. Similarly, the metaphor could suggest the narrator feels a degree of jealousy, possibly even self-loathing, because their father embraced death willingly rather than remaining with the living. Ultimately, the metaphor’s innate impossibility speaks to the narrator’s desire to rationalize their loss because the reality, that his father simply died, is too painful for him to bear.

As you can see, the paragraph clearly engages with a poetic device and uses an appropriately embedded quotation. The subsequent interpretations are then varied enough to avoid repeating each other, but all clearly link to the theme of loss that was mentioned in the question. Obviously, this is only one analytical paragraph, but a completed essay should contain 4-5. This would allow the writer to analyze enough different devices and link them to both themes mentioned in the question.

Conclusions

By this stage, you should have written the bulk of your essay in the form of your introduction and 4-5 main analytical paragraphs. If you have done those things properly, then the conclusion should largely take care of itself.

The world’s simplest essay plan sounds something like this:

• Tell them what you’re going to tell them
• Tell them what you’ve told them

This is, naturally, an oversimplification, but it is worth bearing in mind. The conclusion to an essay is not the place to introduce your final, groundbreaking interpretation. Nor is it the place to reveal a hitherto unknown piece of contextual information that shatters any prior critical consensus with regard to the poem you are writing about. If you do either of these things, the examiner will be asking themselves one simple question: why didn’t they write this earlier?

In its most simple form, a conclusion is there, to sum up the points you have made and nothing more.

As with the previous sections, there is a little more to a great conclusion than merely stating the things you have already made. The trick to a great conclusion is to bind those points together to emphasize the essay’s overarching thread or central argument. This is a subtle skill, but mastering it will really help you to finish your essays with a flourish by making your points feel like they are more than the sum of their parts.

Finally, let’s remind ourselves of the hypothetical essay question we’ve been using:

Remember that, just like your introduction, your conclusion should be brief and direct and must not attempt to do more than it needs to.

In conclusion, Kavanagh’s poem utilizes numerous techniques to capture the ways in which loss is both inescapable and a source of enormous pain. Moreover, the poet subverts positive memories by showcasing how they can cause loved ones more pain than comfort in the early stages of grief. Ultimately, the poem demonstrates how malleable memory can be in the face of immense loss due to the way the latter shapes and informs the former.

As you can see, this conclusion is confident and authoritative but does not need to provide evidence to justify this tone because that evidence has already been provided earlier in the essay. You should pay close attention to the manner in which the conclusion links different points together under one banner in order to provide a sense of assuredness.

You should refer to the poet by either using their full name or, more commonly, their surname. After your first usage, you may refer to them as ‘the poet.’ Never refer to the poet using just their first name.

This is a good question, and the answer entirely depends on the level of study as well as the nature of the examination. If you are writing a timed essay for a school exam, you are unlikely to need any form of referencing. If, however, you are writing an essay as part of coursework or at a higher education institution, you may need to refer to the specific guidelines of that institution.

Again, this will depend on the type of essay you are being asked to write. If you are writing a longer essay or writing at a higher educational level, it can be useful to refer to other poems in the writer’s repertoire to help make comments on an aspect of the poem you are primarily writing about. However, for the kind of essay outlined in this article, you should focus solely on the poem you have been asked to write about.

This is one of the most common concerns students have about writing essays . Ultimately, the quality of an essay is more likely to be determined by the quality of paragraphs than the quantity anyway, so you should focus on making your paragraphs as good as they can be. Beyond this, it is important to remember that the time required to write a paragraph is not fixed. The more you write, the faster they will become. You should trust the process, focus on making each paragraph as good as it can be, and you’ll be amazed at how the timing issue takes care of itself.

Other Resources

We hope you have found this article useful and would love for you to comment or reach out to us if you have any queries about what we’ve written. We’d love to hear your feedback!

In the meantime, we’ve collated a list of resources you might find helpful when setting out to tackle a poetry essay, which you can find below.

• Do poems have to rhyme?
• 10 important elements of poetry
• How to analyze a poem with SMILE
• How to approach unseen poetry
• 18 Different Types of Themes in Poetry

Home » Poetry Explained » How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)

About Joe Santamaria

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Santamaria, Joe. "How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/how-to-write-a-poetry-essay/ . Accessed 20 August 2024.

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How to Write a Poetry Review

By Glynn Young 16 Comments

We had considerable conversation, and a little controversy, around my post two weeks ago, The 6 Most Overused Words in Poetry Reviews . I didn’t realize poetry reviews were such a hot topic.

A common question arose: “OK, so you have six overused words in poetry reviews and three more that are contenders for the list of most overused. Just how do you go about writing a poetry review?”

I consider poetry and book reviews highly subjective endeavors. It is someone’s opinion, after all, of someone else’s creative work. There’s no textbook approach I could cite that would meet all conditions and situations.

But I can explain how to write a poetry review by describing how I do poetry reviews myself.

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)

And you can blame Walter Lippmann (1889 – 1974).

Lippmann wrote a book entitled Public Opinion (1922) that was likely the most influential book on journalism until Marshall McLuhan came along more than 40 years later with Understanding Media (1964). Lippmann was a modernist, strongly influenced by science and the scientific method, and saw journalists as a key link between government and the public. He recognized that people bring preconceived ideas with them (we call them worldviews today) and it was critical to present the facts before those preconceived ideas could harden.

What flowed from Lippmann’s ideas was the notion of objectivity in journalism. What also developed was a journalistic approach known as “The Five Ws” or “The Five Ws and One H”—who, what, when, where, why and how. This is what I learned in journalism school in college, even as the ideas were becoming much more fluid with the impact of television (McLuhan) and the Watergate scandal. A decade later, the influence of post-modernism would begin to make an impact as well.

As an aside, Lippmann was a co-founder of The New Republic ; won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and reporting; helped Woodrow Wilson draft the Fourteen Points speech; coined the phrase Cold War ; feuded with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War; and is considered today to be the father of modern journalism.

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5 Ws and One H

Those “Five Ws and One H”—that’s generally how I write poetry reviews. It was how I learned to write news stories in college, and how I learned to write first music and fiction reviews and later poetry reviews.

Who : I like to know who the poet is, what (if anything) has been previously published, if they have a website and how they describe themselves, and, if available, to see a photo. This is information that helps shape a review, and it’s important for a reader to know. The “who, ” even if brief, places a personality around the poems under consideration.

What : What kind of poetry is it? What form does it follow (or does it have a form)? What is the subject of the poems in the collection?

When : Is this the poet’s first collection? A chapbook? Where does it fall in the poet’s writing career? Does the collection make use of childhood or old-age themes and ideas? Is time an important factor in the poems?

Where : Does the volume have a geography? Robert Frost has New England, Carl Sandburg had Chicago, Walt Whitman had the Civil War hospitals of Washington and his home in New York, and Emily Dickinson had Amherst, Massachusetts. Is geography or a sense of place a strong element in the collection being reviewed?

Why : What is the poet trying to accomplish? What are the themes and ideas the poet is attempting to communicate?

How : How does the poet use language? What are the key metaphors (and there are almost always key metaphors)? What images are employed? What does all of this tell us about what’s going on in these poems?

While I always believe in providing context for a review, the fact is that a book of poetry can be evaluated simply on the basis of itself. It can also be evaluated by focusing solely on any one (or two) of the Five Ws and One H.

I’m not sure if Walter Lippmann ever thought his influence would extend to the writing of poetry reviews, but I don’t think he would be surprised.

Photo by Mike Locke, Creative Commons, via Flickr.  Post by Glynn Young , author of the novels Dancing Priest and A Light Shining , and Poetry at Work .

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Megan Willome says

July 21, 2015 at 9:50 am

See? Journalism!

Mary Sayler says

July 21, 2015 at 11:16 am

Timely again, Glynn. I have a bilingual edition to review, and your article helped. I suspect other poets and writers will gain much from your suggestions too, so I’ll highlight your post on the Christian Poets & Writers blog – http://www.christianpoetsandwriters.com

Charity Singleton Craig says

July 22, 2015 at 5:34 pm

Glynn – This is enormously helpful for reviews of all types. It’s also a good way just to enter into literature of all types, to find the context and the meaning of words others write. Thanks so much!

Violet N. says

July 25, 2015 at 9:28 am

“Objectivity in journalism…” what a novel concept!

Great article. As Charity said above, helpful for all review. I’m going to file this one.

Grant Clauser says

August 4, 2015 at 9:14 am

The last one, the “how” is the most important, and the one that gets most neglected in reviews. So often the reviewer focuses on the subject and themes in poems, and not the craft or style, but it’s the craft that set the great poems apart from the rest.

Koona Smith says

September 27, 2016 at 3:22 pm

thank you so much. you helped me with my problem. God bless.

Garima says

March 11, 2017 at 6:55 am

It was an immensely helpful read. Thank you!

Smitha says

July 9, 2019 at 5:22 am

This post is extremely helpful. Have a few books to write a review on and had no idea of how to go about it. Thank you for this.

Lalawmpuii Ralte says

September 2, 2019 at 11:02 pm

I find this post really helpful. I have to write a review on my sister’s collection of poems and I didn’t know how to begin. Now at least I can try

June 17, 2020 at 4:18 am

Hi Glynn – very humorous and true. I wondered what all the luminosity was about!!! I was comforted by again finding myself grounded, as in any state of learning, by the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. I agree that one has to start with oneself before reading any other review. I have used these 6 word-tools in the Learning and Development profession for years. I don’t suppose one can invent a sequencing of words but by attaching oneself to their usefulness and by sharing learning, they can transform into way-marker posts. Thanks for reminding me and for being Lippman-like … for sharing, for being a guide 🙂

June 17, 2020 at 6:55 am

The six words are tried and true – but they still work just fine. Thanks for the comment, Mary.

I. Mónica del P says

August 31, 2020 at 5:05 pm

Greetiengs from Bogotá! Hi Glynn:) Just last night I got to know this space. Recently I began to read poetry “judiciously” and with this article you have helped me a lot to improve my approach with the genre (and to enjoy it more). Have you read Raul Gómez Jattin? I recommend it to you. I would like to know your opinion.

August 31, 2020 at 5:54 pm

Thanks for the comment! I looked into Gomez Jattin. On Amazon, his works are available only in Spanish. I checked two other sites, and all they had were Spanish versions as well. If you come across an English translation, please let me know!

August 31, 2020 at 6:14 pm

Thanks to you, you are very generous with knowledge. Of course, I will tell you.:)

J'Naye Wise says

April 5, 2021 at 7:32 pm

Hello Glynn, it’s a great article with tons of insights to learn from. It’ll be very useful to me since I’m planning to start my second book of poems already.

Anita Warrington says

April 5, 2021 at 7:36 pm

Keep up the good work Glynn, you are a great help especially to the poetry community and new writers who are just starting.

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The Best Poetry Review: How-To Guides, Examples, and Practice

This series on Poetry explores different poem types, their historical significance, and offers practical tips on writing and analysis.

Designed for easy use at home or in the classroom, it brings poems to life for readers and writers alike.

Topics for Review

What is poetry.

Discover the essence of poetry as you explore different types of poems as well as the evolution of poetry over time. You'll also learn helpful tips for reading, writing, & citing poems.

Poetry Analysis

This Poetry Analysis section breaks down the building blocks of poetry, from its structure and rhyme schemes to the use of imagery. Engage in hands-on practice with step-by-step analysis of famous poems!

Poem Themes

This section explores various themes in poetry, such as love, life, nature, and change. Each post includes a curated selection of poems that highlight these themes!

Poem Studies: Famous Poems & Voices of Today

Featuring famous poems and contemporary voices, each post dives into a poet's work, discussing themes, styles, and impacts. Discover old classics and new favorites!

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SRPR Review Essay

Each issue of SRPR concludes with “The SRPR Review Essay,” a long analytical essay (20-25 pp) that blurs the line between the short, opinion-driven review and the academic article. Each review essay is written by an established poet-critic who situates 3-5 new books of contemporary poetry within relevant conversations concerning poetry and poetics. At least half of the books discussed in the review essay are published by small presses. Recent SRPR review essays include:

Issue 48.2 : Poetics of Entanglement: Recent Interventions in Gay Shame and Stigma by Phil Spotswood. A review of books by Aaron Smith, Justin Phillip Reed, and Patrick Kindig. entire text )--> Issue 48.1 : Exposure, Confinement, Haunting: Visual Poetry in the Twenty-First Century by Joanne Diaz. A review of books by Katy Didden, Sarah J. Sloat, and Mai Der Vang. ( entire text ) Issue 47.2 : “Dreams of Growing to Rock a Rhyme”: Tradition and Experiment in Recent American Sonnets by Brian Brodeur. A review of books by Caki Wilkinson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Matthew Buckley Smith, Alexis Sears, and John Murillo. (entire text ) Issue 47.1 : Redefining Our Futures: Recent Abolitionist Poetic Practice by Allison Serraes. A review of books by DaMaris B. Hill, Mahogany L. Brown, and Shayla Lawz. ( entire text ) Issue 46.2 : Seriousness, Humorously by Andrew Dorkin. A review of books by Joan Retallack, Morgan Parker, and Fred Moten. ( entire text ) Issue 46.1 : Poems in a Pandemic by contributing authors Sesshu Foster, Amy Gaeta, Anna Leahy, Timothy Liu, Mark Wallace, and Jillian Weise. Reviewing a book by Alice Quinn. ( entire text ) Issue 45.2 : Black Poems, White Space by Michael Theune. A review of books by Ashley M. Jones, francine j. harris, and Don Paterson. ( entire text ) Issue 45.1 : Disciples of Baldwin by Korey Williams. A review of books by Malcolm Tariq, Jericho Brown, and Carl Phillips. ( entire text ) Issue 44.2 : Migrant Poets Amid the Mire of Republican Antinepantla by Diego Báez. A review of books by Javier Zamora, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Jan-Henry Gray. ( entire text ) Issue 44.1 : Form Dysfunction by Spencer Short. A review of books by Caroline Levine, Terrence Hayes, and Frederick Seidel. ( entire text ) Issue 43.2 : Taking Joy in Keats, the Comedian Poet by Brian Rejack. A review of books by Dan Beachy-Quick and Eric G. Wilson. ( entire text ) Issue 43.1 : Bad Plath: Excess and Theatricality in Contemporary Poetry by Johannes Göransson. A review of books by Cynthia Cruz, Brooke Ellsworth, Moss Angel the Undying, and Sara Tuss Efrik. ( entire text ) Issue 42.2 : The Body Apocalyptic: Recent Books from the Anthropocene by Jennifer Rane Hancock. A review of books by Angela Hume, Meghan Privitello, and Sam Witt. ( entire text ) Issue 42.1 : The Transcendental Circuit by Joshua Corey. A review of books by Ben Lerner, Claudia Rankine, Reginald Gibbons, and Kirill Medvedev. ( entire text ) Issue 41.2 : To Write the Larger Scene: Notes on the New Political Lyric by John Beer. A review of books by Nathaniel Mackey, Bhanu Kapil, Melissa Buzzeo, and Tyehimba Jess. ( entire text ) Issue 41.1 : The New in the News: Poetry, Authenticity, and the Historical Imagination by Bruce Bond. A review of books by Karen Solie and Adam Kirsch. ( entire text )  Issue 40.2 : Evolution and Apophatic Thought: A Theological Poetics for Our Time by Jerry Harp. A review of books by Eric Pankey, Michael Robbins, and Kimberly Johnson. e ntire te xt )--> Issue 40.1 : D U.S. KS by Aracelis Girmay. A review of books by Eduardo C. Corral, Claudia Rankine, and Jean Valentine. ( excerpt ) Issue 39.2 : Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Contemporary Rhyme in Poetry by Robert Archambeau. A review of books by R. S. Gwynn, Michael Robbins, Amanda Smeltz, and Ben Mazer. ( excerpt ) Issue 39.1 : Should "I Quit // Making This Poem"? Chris Dombrowsky’s narrative-style review essay on The Ecopoetry Anthology (Editors Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street) and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Editors Joshua Corey, SRPR 37.1 Featured Poet, and G. C. Waldrep). ( excerpt ) Issue 38.2 : Portals, Placentas, and the Corpus Entire: Three Takes on Ekphrasis by Katy Didden. A review of books by David Wojahn, Forrest Gander, and Sarah Fox. ( excerpt ) Issue 38.1 : The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now by Seth Abramson. A review of new books by Anthony Madrid, Chelsey Minnis, and Matt Hart. ( entire essay ) Issue 37.2 : Torture Memos: Tracing Violence in Contemporary U.S. Poetry by Joyelle McSweeney. A review of new books by Richard Greenfield, Ben Kopel, and Khadijah Queen. ( excerpt ) Issue 37.1 : Bridging the Distance: Documentation and Disappearance in Performatic Poetry by Becca Klaver. A review of new books by Cecilia Vicuña, Kaia Sand, and Anne Carson. ( excerpt ) Issue 36.2 : Raising the Net by Michael Theune. A review of new books by Jeff Hilson, Karla Kelsey, Nick Demske, and Joshua Corey. ( excerpt ) Issue 36.1 : Dressed by Fire by Judith Harris. A review of new books by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Duriel E. Harris. ( excerpt ) Issue 35.2 : Like Animals, Like Love by Andrew Osborn. A review of new books by Peter Campion, David Baker, and Melissa Range. ( excerpt )

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How to Write a Poem Analysis: 6 Steps for Students and New Reviewers

Elliot Riley

Emily Butler is a librarian and writer. You can discover more of their literary opinions on their YouTube channel, youtube.com/emilybutler, and follow them on Twitter @EmilyFButler1.

View All posts by Elliot Riley

If you’re a student or new reviewer first approaching the task, you may be wondering how to write a poem analysis. Fortunately, there are concrete steps you can take to analyze a poem or collection of poetry. Even if you do not plan on learning how to write a poem analysis essay, building a routine of analysis into your poetry reading can deepen your appreciation for the genre.

Poems have many layers of meaning. A particularly beautiful and well-crafted poem only becomes more enjoyable the more you increase your understanding of the decisions the poet made to craft it. The following steps outline the kinds of questions to ask yourself while writing a poem analysis.

Step 1: Read the Poem Aloud

Poetry has a long oral history. Poets often utilize sound techniques which are easier to detect when reading the poem aloud. Read it once without an analytical focus. Simply notice how you respond to the poem. Begin by asking yourself broad, simple questions such as: How did this make me feel? What do I think the poet is trying to say?

Jot some notes down about your initial impression. Analyzing a poem is a recursive process. You will read the poem several times, and these first impressions can provide interesting clues for what to focus on in your analysis.

Step 2: Identify the Type of Poem

There are several different types of poems, but all poems fall into three overarching categories: free verse, formal verse, and prose poems. Formal poetry itself comes in many more specific forms. Check out A Beginner’s Guide to Different Types of Poems.

There are certain analytical questions you can ask yourself depending on the type of the poem you’re reading. If this is a prose poem, ask yourself, what exactly makes this piece of writing a poem, as opposed to a short piece of prose? Recognizing a specific poetic form allows you to contextualize the poem in history. For example, if you’re reading a sonnet, consider how the poem you’re analyzing fits with or fights against the conventions of sonnets.

Step 3: Mark It Up

There is no one correct way to mark up a poem. You can underline lines which stand out to you. You can take notes in the margins identifying poetic techniques as you see them. You can scan the poem,  a method of marking stressed and unstressed syllables. You can circle words which seem important or stand out as surprising.

If you are reviewing an entire poetry collection, it’s a good idea to take notes in the margins about particular motifs or themes. That way, when you are finished with your first read, you can look for ideas which appeared in multiple poems.

Step 4: Consider Poetic Techniques

Read the poem several times, considering a single poetic technique at a time. For example, free verse and formal poems use line breaks. Read through the poem once, focusing on how the poet has broken lines, and the impact of those decisions. If the poem contains stanzas, do the same for stanzas. You can repeat this process with any poetic technique: similes, metaphors, imagery, assonance, consonance, alliteration. How do these poetic techniques support, enhance, or problematize the overall message of the poem? Your observations will prove crucial when you are ready to sit down and write a poem analysis.

Step 5: Pay Attention to the Turn(s)

In poetry, the term “volta,” sometimes called a “turn,” is a shift in the tone, meaning, or style of a poem. This is a common enough poetic technique that it warrants its own step in the analytic process. Nearly every sonnet contains a turn in the final two lines of the poem, but countless other types of poems contain some sort of shift.

Voltas are so common that if the poem you’re reading does not contain a volta, that is a decision worth incorporating into a poem analysis. You can always ask yourself whether or not a poem contains a turn, and how this impacts the poem overall. Focus on the final lines of a poem, since that is where the volta typically appears.

Step 6: Make an Argument

If you are reviewing an entire poetry collection you can use the above steps for each poem. Then consider the way that the poet has chosen to order the poems within the collection. Revisit the first and last poems, asking yourself how they might function as a kind of introduction and conclusion to the collection.

As with any other essay in the realm of literature, in order to write a poem analysis essay, you should formulate an argument and back it up with evidence. Different readers can have opposing ideas about how a poem or collection of poetry operates, and that’s okay, as long as both readers have evidence to support their claims. How do you back up your claims with evidence? Refer to your notes, especially your observations of poetic techniques. Whenever necessary, quote exact lines or stanzas and use them to support your argument.

Step 7: Consider the Audience

Writing a book review of a poetry collection is considerably different from writing an essay about it. That is because book reviews serve a different purpose than essays do. Individual readers, book buyers, and librarians read reviews in order to decide whether or not to purchase a book.

Ask yourself: what kind of reader might enjoy this collection? It’s always a good idea to compare and contrast to other collections of poetry. You can recommend the poetry collection you’re reviewing to fans of another poet, for example.

Book reviews tend to be considerably shorter than essays, often as short as two or three hundred words. For that reason, it’s important to be concise. Unlike reviewing fiction or nonfiction, you do not exactly need to “summarize” a poetry collection. Most poetry collections cannot be summarized the way that a novel or nonfiction book can. Instead, list some of the central thematic concerns of the collection and describe the poetic style. Tell your readers what kind of poems they will find in this collection. Are these prose poems, free verse, formal verse, or a combination? Are they simple, accessible poems, or complex poems with unusual syntax? Does the collection contain a lot of references?

In a book review, you will want to quote a line or two which represents some aspect of the poetry collection as a whole. Since you do not have a lot of space, choose something representative of the poet’s style. This will give readers an idea of whether or not this collection appeals to them. For more information about writing book reviews, check out How To Write a Book Review: Six Steps to Take .

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Poetry & Poets

Explore the beauty of poetry – discover the poet within

How To Write A Poetry Essay

Introduction

Poetry is the art of expressing emotions, ideas and thoughts in a creative way. Writing about poetry may be difficult for some people as it involves not just understanding the text, but also interpreting its implications. The key to writing a successful poetry essay is to explore what the poem means to you and finding out what the main themes and ideas of the poem are. Through this process, you will be able to take a deep dive into the analysis of the poem. In this article, we will provide an overview of how to write an effective poetry essay.

Preparing for Poetry Analysis

Before diving into writing your essay, it is essential to familiarize yourself with the basics of poetry. Firstly, it is important to read through the poem and examine the poem’s structure, meter, and rhyme scheme. These elements often give insight into the mood and themes of the poem. Additionally, it may also be useful to identify the poem’s speaker and its written form. It is only once these components are understood that you can begin to analyze the poem in greater detail. Secondly, it is helpful to examine the choice of words used in the poem. The poet’s use of vocabulary can reveal clues about his feelings and thoughts on the subject. Furthermore, you may also want to focus on particular words that are commonly used in the poem, as their inclusion may be used to convey a specific hidden meaning. For example, if the poem often uses the words ‘free’ and ‘liberty’, then it may be a way to express the theme of freedom.

Including Evidence in Your Essay

In order to effectively analyze a poem, it is important that your essay includes evidence from the poem that reinforce your argument. It is crucial to include specific examples of passages, lines, or words that you feel demonstrate the poem’s underlying themes or messages. Moreover, you may also want to explicitly state the effect these examples have on the meaning of the poem. For instance, the poet’s deliberate use of sad words to communicate grief.

Making Connections

In addition to carefully analysing the poem, it is also important to make meaningful connections between different aspects of the poem. This may involve connecting literary elements, such as images, symbols, and allusions, to a broader theme or idea. These connections can be used to develop your understanding of the poem and illustrate how different elements come together to form a more holistic interpretation.

Invoking Imagery to Interpret the Poem

A great way to interpret the poem is to compare its themes to an image or painting. This way, you can visualize the poem’s message and identify its different facets. If done correctly, this method can provide you with an even deeper understanding of the poem’s true meaning.

Creating Your Thesis Statement

Having read and analyzed the poem, it is time to develop your thesis statement. This is the statement that outlines your analysis and interpretation of the poem. A strong thesis statement should concisely sum up the poem’s main idea and your interpretation of it. It should also steer clear of being too subjective or judgmental.

Proofreading and Editing

After finishing your essay, it is essential to proofread and edit it to refine it further. You may want to read the essay out loud to identify any grammatical errors or inconsistencies. Furthermore, you may also want to review your essay to ensure that your argument is well-articulated and your analysis is accurate.

Arguing Your Viewpoint

For a successful poetry essay, it is important to provide your own subjective viewpoint on the poem. Feel free to use first-person narrative and provide your opinion on a particular element of the poem. This can help to create a sense of connection between the reader and the poem, as well as adding emotional triggers to your essay.

Using the Active Voice

Another key rule to consider when writing a poetry essay is to give preference to the active voice over the passive voice when expressing your ideas. This will enhance the clarity of your essay and make it easier for the reader to understand your analysis. Using the active voice will help to make your argument more convincing, as readers can clearly understand how and why you arrived at a certain conclusion.

Expanding on the Topic

Evaluating the poem’s context.

In order to get the most out of your poetry essay, you should consider researching and evaluating the poem’s context. This includes understanding the poet’s biography, their motivations for writing the poem, and any political or social movements that the poem may have been influenced by. By taking the poem’s context into account, you can gain an even better insight into the work and develop an even more thorough interpretation of the poem.

Exploring Different Perspectives

When writing your essay, it can be helpful to explore different non-academic perspectives that can help give you a more comprehensive understanding of the poem. Engaging with other interpretations and opinions can help you to get an even better idea of what the poem is trying to say. Additionally, it can also provide you with insight into the cultural significance of the poem.

Considering the Poem’s Aesthetic Elements

When analyzing a poem, it is important to consider the poem’s aesthetic elements, such as its sound, rhythm, and meter. These aspects of a poem often convey the poem’s true meaning and can provide deeper insight into the poem’s themes and ideas. Additionally, they can also help you to better identify and convey the poem’s effect on the reader.

Incorporating Relevant Data

To further bolster your argument and make your essay more convincing, you may also want to cite relevant data and sources. This includes any papers or studies on the poem, as well as any quotes from experts on the poem. By including this data, your essay will appear more credible and will be more likely to convince your reader.

Adding Your Own Insights and Analysis

The final step to writing your poetry essay is to include your own insights and analysis. This is important for providing your essay with its unique voice and is essential for providing a unique argument. Using your knowledge of the poem, provide the reader with a summary of your own ideas and opinions on the poem. By doing so, you can make your essay more relatable and engaging to the reader.

Minnie Walters

Minnie Walters is a passionate writer and lover of poetry. She has a deep knowledge and appreciation for the work of famous poets such as William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and many more. She hopes you will also fall in love with poetry!

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How to Write a Poetry Review

Poetry review definition.

A poetry review is a review in which you should provide a highly personal interpretation of a poem, and describe the symbolic meaning of the words, phrases, and images presented in the poem. It is common for a person to share his or her thoughts and impressions on what he or she has read. Sometimes the same book or poem produces the opposite impression on different readers. A review is an exchange of impressions about a book, and the expression of its attitude to the images created by the author.

The Purpose of the Poetry Review

Choose one of the purposes of your review: 1) Draw attention to the poem, influence the opinions of other people, and argue over the evaluation of artistic images. 2) Share the impression of what has been read with people who are far away. 3) Go deeper in understanding what has been read.

How to Prepare for Writing a Poetry Review

Depending on the chosen goal, choose a genre of review. It can be an article, a letter, or an essay. A review always involves listeners. It can be a friend, a teacher, a librarian, or a wider audience. Both the form of the response and the content depend on the person you are addressing.

Think about the name of your review. Even the word “review” can already become a name. At the same time, the work may have another heading: “Poem that touched,” “Invitation to meditation,” or “Lessons of love.” After you understand how to prepare for writing a review, it is time to know how to write a poetry review.

Questions to Ask Before Writing a Poetry Review

1. What material should be used according to the structure of the review? 2. What parts should the review include? 3. When was the poem written? 4. Do you like the poem or not? 5. How can the stated assessment be argued? 6. What does the title of the poem say? 7. What did the author want to say in the poem? 8. How does the author relate to the depicted lyrical images? 9. What is the innovation in creating a poem? 10. What artistic characteristics were used in the poem?

Poetry Review Writing Steps

• The first step will be helpful both for writing a sample review and when you need to know how to write a poetry book review. Pick up the material and arrange it depending on the structure of the review. Keep in mind: the review consists of two main parts. In the first part, an opinion is expressed about whether the poem was liked or not liked. In the second part, the justification is substantiated, and the stated assessment is argued. There is no clear line between the parts. Be sure to include in your work your opinion about how the author relates to the depicted lyrical images. Evaluate the features of its perception, and what is the innovation in creating a poem.
• Analysis of the artistic characteristics of the poem in the middle classes may be absent. But high school students should include in their work elements of the analysis of the poem . Literary studies offer several options for analysis. To create a review, do not work on all the items. Choose only those that will help you pick up the necessary arguments. Here is an approximate plan for analyzing the poem:
• Date of writing.
• Real, biographical, and factual material.
• Genre peculiarity.
• Ideological content: a) leading topic; b) main idea; c) emotional coloring of feelings; d) external impression and internal reaction to it.
• Interpretation of the poem.
• The structure of the poem: a) the main images; b) figurative means (epithets, metaphors, allegories, comparison, hyperbole, litotes, irony, sarcasm); c) syntactic figures (repetition, antithesis, anaphora, epiphany, inversion); d) sound recording (alliteration, assonance); e) poetic size, rhyme, methods of rhyme; e) stanza (couplet, triste, quatrain, octave, sonnet).
• To correctly interpret the poem, think what lies behind the words of the poet. Highlight keywords, and think over their hidden meaning. The compressed word becomes concentrated, multivalued.
• The peculiarity of the lyrics lies in the fact that it is primarily focused on the inner world of man. There is no description of the events in it. The inner meaning must be understood emotionality. In addition, the lyric poem is plotless. That is why associative thinking plays an important role. For argumentation, use the works of other authors and perform a comparative analysis. Refer to works of art and music.
• Completing the work on the review, check whether you have enough arguments, and whether there is no unnecessary, extraneous material. Edit your review. Do not forget that your work is written in a journalistic style, so it must be emotional and bright. It should work on your listeners. Use sentences different in structure for this purpose in your review. Gradation, inversion, and impersonal sentences are appropriate.

Poem Sample Analysis

The following poetry review sample will help you to find your own approach for dealing with your own review writing. The author of the sample analyzes a poem according to the genre and academic standards. Our poetry review sample is an opportunity for you to develop the talent of the analyst in yourself and write your reviews successfully. So, read through the following analysis and learn how to write reviews on your own.

Click the images to see their full size.

Tips for Writing a Poetry Review

A review of a poetic text develops the ability to define what is typical for the poet and his epoch, the features of rhythm (poetic dimensions), and the methods of rhyming. The analysis necessarily displays the subject and (if any) the plot, as well as the view of the author and his or her hero on the question posed in the work.

• In the beginning, give a brief biographical note about the author. Provide more details about the history of the creation of the poem: place, date, dedication, and other details.
• Define the system of versification: it can be syllabic (based on the number of syllables in each line), tonic (the basis is the number of stressed syllables), or a synthesis of the first two, which is the most common system.
• Proceeding from the system, determine the poetic size: iambic, trochee, dactyl, amphibrach, anapaest, tact, and accent verse. The size is determined by the number of syllables between the stresses.
• Count the number of stops for the stressed syllables. Determine the type of rhyme: by accuracy (exact, approximate or absent), or by shock (male, female, dactylic, hyperdactylic). Based on the correspondence between rhyme and metric, determine whether the last stop is full or truncated. Note that on different lines of the strophe the rhyme can differ according to the stress criterion.
• Determine the volume of the stanza in the lines.
• Set the method of rhyming: steam, shingles (simple or complex), and so on.
• Analyze the plot and its relation to the form. Describe how the author asks the question, how he or she is looking for an answer (if he or she is looking), and how he or she relates to the problem.
• Give your own assessment of the work: what you were thinking about while reading it, what feelings you experienced, and who would be advised to read (age, professional, other social and cultural groups).

You have read through our guide and now you know how to write a poetry review. With our guidelines, it will be easier to deal with your review no matter whether you need to write about a poem or a book with a collection of poems. Find poetry review examples on our blog for a better understanding of your task and read through other guides for getting help with other academic custom research paper .

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Birmingham Lit Mag Showcases Poetry, Essays About Poetry and Interviews With Poets; Review of Birmingham Poetry Review, Spring 2016

• Michael Arnett

Birmingham Lit Mag Showcases Poetry, Essays About Poetry and Interviews With Poets

Review of birmingham poetry review , spring 2016 by michael arnett.

Birmingham Poetry Review is a journal dedicated to poetry, essays about poetry, and interviews with poets. The journal is published annually by the University of Alabama at Birmingham and was founded in 1987. The spring 2016 issue is roughly 200 pages, neatly bound featuring cover art by Debora Greger.

Each issue contains a featured poet section featuring poems by, interviews with, and essays about the particular poet. In this issue (43) it is Barbara Ras, winner of the Walt Whitman Prize for her collection Bite Every Sorrow (1998). The poems featured seem to give a fair sampling of her work (although, being unfamiliar with her work, it is difficult for me to determine); her poems are expansive, reminiscent, and loquacious; without even reading a poem, but just observing it on the page, its long, uneven lines, one gets a sense that they can hardly contain themselves, that they are bursting the bonds of line and stanza. Observation and memory are Ras’ favorite tools, as in the poems “Boarding” and “Harvest.”

In the interview which follows, Ras explains the role memory plays in her poetry:

Memories form the largest critical mass in my conscious and unconscious life. They’re the keepers of life’s experiences.... Of course, the challenge is to recognize how memories can energize a poem, provide an emotional connection for the reader, and also reach out into some larger sphere.

Eric Smith’s complementary essay on Ras’ poetics is astute and illuminating, providing an informative overview of her work.

The contributor poems are somewhat varied in form, though mostly conventional free-verse with typical subject matter. For instance, there are two poems by two different poets titled “Pastoral” and another that references the subject, albeit sardonically: “The very word pastoral raises my hackles” (“Spring Baring Arms” by William Logan).

The poems throughout are for the most part observational and confessional. There is a touchingly beautiful prose poem by Sean Thomas Dougherty called “My Youngest Daughter Brings Me Daises and Bits of Plastic Trash,” a subtly formal poem by George David Clark called “Poltergeists” with rhyming quatrains, and a pantoum by J. Bruce Fuller called “The Penitent Magdalene.” There is also a section of five poems by the Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhao translated by Alexis Levitin.

L.S. Asekoff’s poems stand out for their daring abstract expressionism and surreal imagery: “Scything the azure waves, / A woman rides the back of a dolphin. / Through your spyglass you can see / The seaweed of her long flowing hair” (“Merleau-Ponty Is a Bridge between the Mother & the Sea”); and rich, evocative symbolism: “He had sailed his boat into another man’s slip. Who would remember his name when he awoke? A door half open to hidden interiors gave him a glimpse of rich brocade, shadowy opulence, a gold charcoal glow, an oval darkness like a luminous egg, cut diamonds echoing stars” (“Teragon”).

Other poets featured heavily in the issue are Debora Greger, with a long, somewhat Orientalist sequence “Postcards from the Tokaido Road,” complete with geishas with faces like “powdered moons,” kimonos, shoguns, and Mt. Fuji; Brandon Courtney with the visceral, PTSD-haunted “The Lotus-Eater;” and four poems Kathryn Starbuck, wife of the late George Starbuck. A personal favorite of mine is Tina Cane’s “Nocturne: Starting Right Now” for its formal breathlessness, serpentine line-wraps and no punctuation, its wry observations (“I thought the TV was a crowd of assholes in my living room and I was not wrong”), and startling imagery imagery: “starting right now / there is just the sky full of grass.”

There is a featured essay by Kieran Quinlan about Seamus Heaney which seems mostly anecdotal and incidental: a reminiscent account of the author’s tenuous acquaintance with the poet, whom he only met once at Vanderbilt. Although Quinlan does focus briefly on Heaney’s Irish nationalist sympathies, he offers no compelling revelation of the poet’s life or work, other than maybe the somewhat lame conclusion that “Seamus is almost too famous.” It is puzzling as to why the essay was included other than the fact it’s about Seamus Heaney and written by a professor at UAB.

The issue concludes with a generous section of reviews, including an insightful review of Edward Hirsch’s Gabriel by Chad Davidson (whose poem “The Field, a Series of Low Buildings, a Distant Road” also appears in the issue). Davidson makes the claim that since its publication in 2014, reviews for Hirsh’s Gabriel have focused disproportionately on the tragedy behind the work (Hirsh’s son died of a drug overdose) and not the work itself. Davidson proposes “To avoid the poem’s technical aspects, its craft, risks reducing it to mere catharsis and diary writing, which it surely is not,” and that “the strength of the poem… is not how accurately it renders grief… but on the contrary how it finds space for the imagination to structure grief and give it form.”

Overall the Birmingham Poetry Review is an establishment journal for established poets, writers, and academics. The majority of the contributors have published at least one book, some as many as fifteen; all have presumably at least an MFA, some doctorates; several are the recipients of NEA, Guggenheim, and other notable grants, awards, and fellowships,; and their combined publication credits include Poetry, AGNI, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Paris Review, North American Review, American Poetry Review , to name the biggies. For those at the middle or apex of their career, BPR is a great journal to submit to. But for those just starting out, or for those with a more experimental bent, BPR may not be the best fit.

APR Prose Submission: Essays, Book Reviews, and Interviews

The American Poetry Review is dedicated to reaching a worldwide audience with a diverse array of the best contemporary poetry and literary prose. APR also aims to expand the audience interested in poetry and literature, and to provide authors, especially poets, with a far-reaching forum in which to present their work. Please do not send previously published material. We strive to respond to all submissions within six months. Copyright: APR holds first serial rights for material that we publish. The copyright automatically reverts to the author upon publication. We do not require that material be copyrighted prior to submission.

         We pay authors at a rate of $1 per line of poetry and $60 per APR page of prose.

Our Most-Read Poems of 2021

Our most-read poems from 2021 comprise powerful and formally inventive work by some of our favorite poets—Solmaz Sharif, Ocean Vuong, Alex Dimitrov, and others. These poems remind us why we turn to poetry in times of crisis and upheaval; each maps a distinctive mind thinking through the joys and pains of being alive today. Hannah Aizenman takes on the thorny subject of empathy in “ The Pain of Others ,” and Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s “ There is An Intimacy ,” set at a COVID testing site, punctures despair with lines of wry humor. Both Natasha Rao’s “ Fullness and Hunger ” and Sarina Romero’s “ At Newport Beach ” dissect the fraught dynamics of family gatherings, while Prageeta Sharma explores the complicated grief of losing a traitorous partner in “ Widowing .” These poems make the world a little more imaginable to us, a little more rife with human connection and possibility. We hope you’ll enjoy reading and rereading them.

–The Editors

“ Wood Working at the End of the World ” by Ocean Vuong “In a field at the end of the world: a streetlamp / shining on a patch of grass…”

“ The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica ” by Ocean Vuong “It’s true I’m all talk & a French tuck / but so what. Like the wind, I ride / my own life…”

“ Patronage ” by Solmaz Sharif “They say / willingness is what one needs / to succeed…”

“ There is An Intimacy ” by Melissa Lozada-Oliva “when the q-tip touches my almost-brain, / about to reach the moment I peed my pants / at my cousin’s birthday party or kissed a boy who isn’t alive anymore…”

“ Notes for My Funeral ” by Alex Dimitrov “No one’s allowed to tell / their sad story at my funeral…”

“ Widowing ” by Prageeta Sharma “My inner controversy of packing up / the last of your studio boxes / towering this new basement that I clean for good…”

“ Fullness and Hunger ” by Natasha Rao “My father orders the crab croquet / and I am quick to correct / croquette for the white waiter / pouring water coquettishly…”

“ At Newport Beach ” by Sarina Romero “Abjection, I say, when Martha asked how / I felt, earlier that day, watching my father rub / his palm back and forth against his girlfriend’s / open thigh…”

“ The Pain of Others ” by Hannah Aizenman “On the radio, I hear a doctor describe / his dilemma: the inalienability / of pain, of sensation altogether…”

“ Geese ” by Robert Travers “That day the sun rose as if / it was the most natural thing / in the world…”

Louise Glück’s Late Style

The critic as friend, rachel cusk, you might also like, our most-read stories of 2021, our most-read archival pieces of 2021, colonial conditions, new perspectives, enduring writing.

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This Collection of Poems Is Skeptical About Poetry’s Value. Or Is It?

Danez Smith’s “Bluff” represents a notable turning point for the poet — and maybe for American poetry as a whole.

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Nam Le is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection “36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.”

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BLUFF: Poems, by Danez Smith

The intent seems clear from the very first words: “anti poetica.” This is the title of the opening poem in Danez Smith’s “Bluff,” and it’s a title that recurs twice more in the collection. Smith’s commanding litany draws us through a run of negatives — there is “no poem wiser than kindness”; “no poem free from money’s ruin”; “no poem in the winter nor in whiteness” — stopping at:

no poem to admonish the state no poem with a key to the locks no poem to free you

So, renunciation. Here, it seems, is poetry against poetry, against any of its claims of art for art’s sake or real-world application. The next poem, “ars america (in the hold),” hones renunciation into war cry, declaring that “if the stars gave birth” to the cruelty of the slave ships and beyond, then “kill the stars … kill all reason … kill god.” (An Amiri Baraka epigraph follows: “Warriors are poets and poems.”)

So, war. Next come the charges, which are personal, savage, self-excoriating. From “less hope”:

apologies. i was part of the joy industrial complex: told them their bodies were miracles & they ate it up, sold someday , made money off soon & now , snuck an ode into the elegy … they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore . we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty &, pitifully, i loved them. i thanked them. i took the awards & cashed the checks. i did the one about the boy when requested, traded their names for followers. in lieu of action, i wrote a book

“Someday” refers to Smith’s long (award-winning) poem “summer, somewhere,” which creates — in, yes, elegiac, beautiful verse — a paradise for murdered Black boys. The “one about the boy” could refer to pretty much any poem from Smith’s three previous books.

“Bluff,” then, represents the anti poetica to those books. It posits Smith at a turning point, as in a poem pointedly titled “volta”: “i need a new bravery. i don’t want to live/a coward’s peace. where’s my mission?/what world comes if i use my hands?” These are the same hands that have — in a fertile phrase — “tendered violence” — for the white gaze, for coin and clout, for politics.

Smith confesses to having been “a slave to slavery, it makes me a/salary, i wanted freedom and they gave me/a name.” Few things are more important in Smith’s poetics than naming. But what happens when the names you call yourself — Black , say, or queer — are put to a different use by “them”? Are yours the only hands on the binds of identity? How can you tell? (“You (you & me) are agent & enemy,” Smith writes.) There’s a startling image in “on knowledge” of a black box with its border stitched in white “I”s; a visual enactment of how Smith — who uses lowercase “i”s — “helped patent/my chain, penned my pen.”

Time, then, not for ego but for action. For less boy and less joy; time to “move my mind/deeper into the dark/question of its use.” The last word in “on knowledge” is action — and it floats completely free from its black square, that icon used so potently by Kazimir Malevich to symbolize artistic rebirth.

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Mary Makofske , from Warwick, NY, is awarded first prize for her poem, “Sex, That Peacock,” and will receive $1000, plus publication in Asheville Poetry Review (Vol. 31, Issue 33, 2024), which will be released in December, 2024.

Second prize is awarded to Paul Alexander , from Forest Hills, NY, for his poem, “Only in Darkness Can You See the Stars” He will receive $250, as well as publication.

Craig Van Rooyen resides on the central coast of California. He is the third prize recipient for his poem “Daylight Savings Poem,” and he will also be published in our next issue.

The next reading period for the William Matthews Poetry Prize is from September 15, 2024 – January 15, 2025. The final judge will be Nickole Brown . For complete guidelines, visit ashevillepoetryreview.submittable.com .

The 2025 William Matthews Poetry Prize

First Prize : $1,000, publication in Asheville Poetry Review , and a featured reading in Asheville Second Prize : $250, publication, and a featured reading in Asheville Third Prize : Publication and a featured reading in Asheville

Judge for 2025 : Nickole Brown

The final judge will read anonymous manuscripts (all identifying information will be removed from the poems).

All submissions will be considered for publication.

Submission Deadline : January 15 of each year.

Send 1-3 poems, any style, any theme, any length, with a $20 entry fee.

Online submissions only, through Submittable:

Back issue content recently added

The Asheville Poetry Review website is in the process of an all-inclusive update. Our mission is to make all of the content of our back issues available online, creating an archive that contains the complete publishing history of our first fifteen years, dating from our first issue, published in June 1994. We thank you for your patience as we update this site.

Below you’ll find links to the most recently added poetry, reviews, essays and interviews.

The Angels of Our Expectations

The fiction of history, double elegy: for a child, for an old man, morning of the duel, of flesh and heaven, never too late, for camilla wren mcdaniel.

— translated from the Latin by A. E. Stallings

— translated from the Spanish by Louis Bourne

Keith Flynn Rene Char Eugenio Montale Jeffery Beam Marilyn Hacker Patricia Smith Thomas P. Feeny Hungarian Dede Wilson Sally Buckner Ron Rash Michael Harper Essay Kathryn Stripling Byer Marilyn Kallet Jonathan Greene Patrick Bizzaro Emmanuel Moses Gaylord Brewer Phebe Davidson Welsh Lee Ann Brown Ryan G. Van Cleave J. W. Bonner Stella Vinitchi Radulescu Gearóid Mac Lochlainn Newton Smith Al Maginnes Robert Bly Jonathan Williams Thomas Rain Crowe R. T. Smith Quincy Troupe Spanish Janice Moore Fuller Jack Hirschman Robert Creeley Lyn Lifshin Luke Hankins William Matthews Emöke Z. B’Racz Russian Simon Perchik Bill Knott Review

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Valparaiso Poetry Review

Click Cover or ‘Learn More’ Button To Open Current Issue

Valparaiso Poetry Review presents poems, interviews, and essays by new, emerging, or well-known poets, including Sherman Alexie, David Baker, John Balaban, Walter Bargen, Claire Bateman, J.P. Dancing Bear, Pam Bernard, Christopher Buckley, Jared Carter, Billy Collins, Mark Conway, Peter Cooley, Alfred Corn, Barbara Crooker, Jim Daniels, William Virgil Davis, Kwame Dawes, Mark DeFoe, Cornelius Eady, Lynnell Edwards, W.D. Ehrhart, Claudia Emerson, Bernardine Evaristo, Patricia Fargnoli, Annie Finch, Daisy Fried, Jeff Friedman, Carol Frost, Brendan Galvin, Reginald Gibbons, David Graham, Jonathan Holden, T.R. Hummer, Colette Inez, Gray Jacobik, Allison Joseph, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Julia Kasdorf, David Kirby, Dorianne Laux, Laurence Lieberman, Frannie Lindsay, Diane Lockward, Rachel Loden, Amit Majmudar, William Matthews, Walt McDonald, Jeff Mock, Alicia Ostriker, Eric Pankey, Elise Paschen, Kevin Pilkington, Stanley Plumly, Doug Ramspeck, Rochelle Ratner, Lex Runciman, Sherod Santos, Margot Schilpp, Vivian Shipley, Beth Simon, Jeffrey Skinner, Floyd Skloot, Karen Skolfield, Dave Smith, Kate Sontag, Barry Spacks, A.E. Stallings, Virgil Suarez, Barton Sutter, Catherine Tufariello, Brian Turner, Ingrid Wendt, Lesley Wheeler, Charles Wright, and many more.

Valparaiso Poetry Review  also offers book reviews and commentary on various poets, including Maggie Anderson, David Baker, John Balaban, Michael Bazzett, Linda Bierds, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Boruch, David Bottoms, Jericho Brown, Jared Carter, Carl Dennis, James Dickey, Sharon Dolin, Rita Dove, Rebecca Dunham, Claudia Emerson, Eve Ewing, B.H. Fairchild, Patricia Fargnoli, Beth Ann Fennelly, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Jeff Friedman, Carol Frost, Brendan Galvin, Jorie Graham, Marilyn Hacker, Zbigniew Herbert, Brenda Hillman, Janet Holmes, Cathy Park Hong, Marie Howe, Tom C. Hunley, Donald Justice, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Ilya Kaminsky, Mary Karr, Ted Kooser, Brad Leithauser, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Rachel Loden, William Matthews, Campbell McGrath, Susan Mitchell, Gregory Orr, Michael Palmer, Marianne Poloskey, Sherod Santos, Vivian Shipley, William Stafford, A.E. Stallings, Mark Strand, Michael Waters, Charles Wright, James Wright, and others.

Valparaiso Poetry Review  suggests an extensive reading list with  recent and recommended books  of contemporary poetry and poetics. Publishers are encouraged to send review copies of new poetry collections or volumes on poetics to  Valparaiso Poetry Review , c/o Edward Byrne, English Department, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN 46383.

VPR  invites submissions of unpublished poems, book reviews, author interviews, and essays about poetry or poetics which have not appeared online and for which the rights belong to the author. Unsolicited manuscripts are read year round. For further information, please visit the  submission guidelines  and correspondence page.

• Marie Howe: Review by John Ruff
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Home » Movies » Movie Reviews

‘Langston Kerman: Bad Poetry’ Review: Intimate Setting, Big Impact

Hats off to Langston Kerman. He is not deterred by being in the center of an intimate room. What’s more difficult for a stand-up set? Being on stage facing the entire audience, or having the audience circle you in a smaller setting? Depending on the nerves, I imagine that many comedians would struggle with the latter — seeing up close the reaction of the audience members must be horrifying if you are bombing. Langston needn’t worry in Bad Poetry — he embraces the room’s ambiance.

You may know Langston Kerman from shows like Insecure , High Maintenance , and Bless This Mess . Heck, it took me a minute to realize I saw him in The Boys Season 2  as Eagle the Archer, a Supe, and an aspiring rapper (according to The Deep, his music career is not going so well, as iterated in Season 3).

But Langston Kerman is still in the infancy of his career in many respects. He clearly understands comedy, and his writing is displayed in Bad Poetry. However, I’m always on the backfoot with these Netflix specials. Sometimes, I wonder, why now? Why does Langston need to delve into stand-up comedy on the biggest platform for it in the world?

But my back foot clearly moved forward in Bad Poetry . Langston Kerman understands how to enjoy an audience. There’s nothing abundantly special about the topics he raises; we’ve heard most of the male tropes presented here, though I like his unique spin on being mixed-race and not knowing what the color of his baby would be. He secures points there, purely for being relatable. However, I must add that Meghan Markle would wince at that joke.

The comedian manages to engage with the audience about his internal frustrations fairly easily when he goes into a rant about how his wife does not trust him to use a microwave and assumes he’d put metal in it. I was howling because these are the little nuisances that become the makeup of modern relationships. 

His salient response to this ordeal is the punchline: if you want to have marriage and children with him but do not trust him to use a microwave, then why bother in the first place?

Langston’s next test is another Netflix special. There’s no doubt about that. This comedy writer deserves plenty more than a comedy club to showcase his talents. And that’s not a slight on upcoming career comedians—they all have to start somewhere.

But when I see natural comedic talent on stage, I want more of it. I said the same about Taylor Tomlinson, but on the flip side, I told the opposite about Matt Rife, who clearly needs to overcome his insecurities about brand identity .

Overall, Langston Kerman: Bad Poetry is a success, as the Netflix stand-up model continues to pay dividends and showcase lesser-known talent. 

Article by Daniel Hart

Daniel is the co-founder of Ready Steady Cut and has served as Editor-in-Chief since 2017. Since then, Dan has been at the top of his game by ensuring that we only produce and upload content of exceptional quality and that we’re up to date with the latest additions to the streaming and entertainment world.

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August 20, 2024

Review: Tiny Robots Render People Immortal but Destroy What Makes Us Human

A sweeping novel about a war-torn future explores personhood and identity

By Jeff VanderMeer

Alex Eben Meyer

Toward Eternity: A Novel by Anton Hur. HarperVia, 2024 ($26.99)

Anton Hur’s Toward Eternity blends the music of science and of poetry to tell a tale of future love, war, and tiny robots known as nanites. Like a reverse-engineered allegory, the novel attempts to fuse the forward momentum of the reader’s care for its most compelling character, Yonghun Han, with high-concept ideas about biotechnology, the future of Earth and the question of identity.

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Han is “Patient One.” He’s been remade in a laboratory in Cape Town, South Africa, by Mali Beeko, a doctor who has cured Han’s cancer through nanite cellular replacement, which essentially renders the recipient immortal. Although Han’s body is new, a scar from a previous kitchen accident has returned to his skin, as if the physical can be affected by the power of the mind. When Han disappears from Beeko’s Singularity Lab into thin air, no one has an explanation—and they’re equally mystified when he reappears. This returned Han believes he is “not Yonghun Han. I am whatever came back with his body.” Han finds Beeko’s journal and continues to write in it in an attempt to make sense of his experience. This is the conceit that carries the book forward through time as various characters inherit the journal and propel the narration into the extremely far future.

The early chapters are suffused with emotional resonance thanks to Han’s extraordinary love for his husband, Prasert, a scholar of 19th-century poetry who has been dead for a decade. There are flashback scenes of Prasert ceding the last bite of a meal to Han and giving Han a back rub, all of which convey a genuine sweetness and authenticity that is rare in depictions of love on the page. The not-Han that has come back grapples with Han’s memories of that relationship in ways that question personhood and identity: “I am the recursion, the vessel necessary for the love to return, a love so great it has overcome the death of its previous vessels to live in this world again, searching for what it had lost.”

The tenderness of that bond also opens a space for Hur to explore the confluence of science and the arts. Han creates an artificial-intelligence entity named Panit to help him better understand poetry. A discussion between Han and Panit about Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret” showcases the novel at its best. In a sense, Han is talking to a version of himself, having trained the AI on his experience of poetry, and the scene should be solipsistic. Instead this conversation about Rossetti “teasing a secret but never revealing it” evokes, again, Han’s deep love for Prasert.

Are we really so resigned to catastrophe that we just trudge forward, hoping to eke out some entertainment before the end?

Soon enough the notebook is passed to Meeko’s Patient Two. Ellen, a musician, has a more aloof tone, and her perspective serves as a useful contrast to Han’s remembered warmth, accentuating it greatly. As the poetry cedes pride of place to music, Ellen’s encounter with doubles of herself presages a future nanite-person takeover of the world while giving clues to the mystery of Han’s disappearance and reappearance. When Panit, the AI, gets time with the notebook, we learn more about Meeko’s experiments. But as the novel slips officially into the future with part two (“The Future”), other kinds of slippage occur.

The science of fiction writing has few hard rules except that almost anything can work. The scaffolding of an idea can carry a novel through to the end, even without maintaining the psychological richness Han’s early chapters accomplish so well. But characterization—committing to interiority and depth of character—is harder to sustain without the author’s constant and devoted attention. A novel that set out to be pathos becomes almost exclusively a science experiment.

It begins with a Panit-Han hybrid, a fusion persona in physical form that overuses the word “ghost” to a pathological extent. When this hybrid pines for a child and encounters a doomed love, the scenes echo Han’s relationship with Prasert, though now to lesser effect. As the journal passes from hand to hand in the future, it feels as if the pages are becoming washed out, the entities writing it less and less knowable.

As the narrative progresses into the far future, the structure becomes harder to follow. The story swaggers through time and character perspectives, the connective tissue often lacking or delivered to the reader through explanatory dialogue. I would have loved to encounter more tension between the rising dominance of AI and the technology’s huge drain on resources and thievery of people’s intellectual property and labor. These issues are present but mostly through sheer extrapolation.

Part of what makes the novel increasingly hard to follow is the blurriness of the scenes. For the most part, Hur doesn’t provide much description of the future settings except when noting there are “trees” or “rocks.” What’ll be perhaps most glaring to readers who appreciate contemporary science fiction is that Hur largely sidesteps the evolution and consequences of our cli­­mate crisis. Instead of ex­­ploring those rough edges, he mostly obliterates them by using the device of a widespread nuclear war. A war that brings mass extermination is hell, all right, but with its harshness blasted out, the future doesn’t feel quite as real or fully realized.

The novel comes to a halt in a long section written from the viewpoint of Delta, a version of Panit-Han’s daughter grown in a nanite vat. Delta has just done something terrible to humanity, yet there’s little sense of the weight of Delta’s actions in the storyline. Instead of something incendiary, something radical, we get mostly more dialogue reasonably explaining the future.

Are we really so resigned to catastrophe that we just trudge forward, hoping to eke out some entertainment be­­­­fore the end? This tone of amiability that creeps into the writing seems to be meant to please the reader, to dull the pain of humans losing who we are. I often wished that the language were sharper.

Writing about the effect of poetry is different than being poetry. For a while Toward Eternity is poetry, until entropy sets in. By the time the novel reaches its end, the carrying forward of the beloved Han feels attenuated, grasping. The burning core of the narrative—that beautifully depicted relationship in the early chapters—is a distant flame you no longer feel the heat of. The things that make us uniquely human are simply too far in the past.

Humsafar: The World of Urdu Poetry

Server costs fundraiser 2024.

For beginners, young or old, Hitesh Gupta Aadil's “Humsafar: The World of Urdu Poetry" is a great companion for exploring the vast and fascinating world of Urdu poetry and transcending the boundaries of literature and culture. The author directly addresses the audience throughout the book while maintaining a sense of intimacy that few other guides have. Essentially a guide for newcomers to Urdu poetry, this book lends itself to enthusiasts and those inquisitive of Urdu language and literature.

“Humsafar” is an Urdu word which means "companion." True to its name, this book acts as a friend to guide the audience through the complex world of Urdu poetry. Hitesh Gupta Aadil is an Urdu language and literature enthusiast and translator; Humsafar is his first anthology, and it was brought to fruition by love and passion over the last five years. Prior knowledge of Urdu poetry is not required for this book; in fact, it is better for the reader to be new to the topic because the book makes a profound first impression that few other anthologies have. It makes an honest attempt to make Urdu language and poetry accessible to a wide audience. It is for anyone and everyone interested in learning about this form of poetry, and it equips the reader with enough history and basics to get an idea about the art form before they dive into poets and poems.

The book explores different types of poetry, such as Ghazal, Nazm, Qatta, Rubaai, Masnavi etc. Out of the 44 chapters, 39 are dedicated to various poets like Meer Taqi Meer, Gulzar, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Javed Akhtar, Mirza Ghalib, and so on. The poets are ordered chronologically according to birth, and each chapter has a brief introduction about the poet followed by some of their poems.

The beginning chapters include an introduction to the book, the author’s process of putting it together, and a short history of Urdu language and poetry with a few flowcharts and diagrams. It also includes technical aspects, discussing the structure of the ghazal and other forms of poetry, the rules of writing , their classifications and themes, and their impact on various cultures across Eurasia. Although popularly known for romance and love, the poems also hold space for themes like humour, spirituality and religion , social issues, and the like.

The author has chosen both popular and lesser-known poets. The poems are easy to read and understand (at least the translations are). The limited amount of poems by each poet ensures the reader experiences a mixture of poets and their styles that not many other guidebooks have. The book gives just enough information succinctly that the reader is encouraged to do some further reading without being bored. As the author reiterates, the first few chapters are not imperative to enjoy the poems. However, they are a nice addition to anyone curious about the history and the technical aspects of the poems. It is a wonderful blend for history and poetry lovers alike.

The poems are first transliterated into English and then supported with English translation. In the end, the book also includes a pronunciation guide, miscellaneous terms related to Urdu literature, and notes for further reading. Footnotes are also added wherever required to explain complex Urdu words in the poems. A poem's meaning, however, is left to the reader and the author acts as a mere liaison between the poet and the reader. As a considerate addition, the author has also attached musical and performance renditions of the poems that one can watch on YouTube or listen to on Spotify. Humsafar is by no means extensive with only 40 poets and 160 poems. Yet, it is a fun and interactive guide that guarantees to pique the reader’s interest.

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Cite this work.

G, A. (2024, August 16). Humsafar: The World of Urdu Poetry . World History Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/review/468/humsafar-the-world-of-urdu-poetry/

Chicago Style

G, Ankita. " Humsafar: The World of Urdu Poetry ." World History Encyclopedia . Last modified August 16, 2024. https://www.worldhistory.org/review/468/humsafar-the-world-of-urdu-poetry/.

G, Ankita. " Humsafar: The World of Urdu Poetry ." World History Encyclopedia . World History Encyclopedia, 16 Aug 2024. Web. 20 Aug 2024.

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Nick Cave on the encounters that brought him to 'Wild God'

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' latest album, Wild God , is out August 30. Megan Cullen/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' latest album, Wild God , is out August 30.

On August 30, the Australian-born rock titan Nick Cave will release Wild God , a new album with his band The Bad Seeds. It's a high point in Cave's career, and NPR Music's Ann Powers spoke with him about the struggles — personal, musical and religious — he faced on the road to making the album. Wild God is filled with songs about encounters with the divine, which does not always take a benevolent form. And it follows a decade in which Cave, having publicly faced tragedy in his own life, has evolved from post-punk's louchest fallen angel into a revered figure among his audience in a new way: a dignified seeker whose courage and wisdom resounds beyond musical boundaries thanks to advice he has shared in interviews, writing projects and public appearances. Perhaps it's not surprising that so many of the songs reckon with the moment of revelation or transformation, or the demand for conversion from a As for the state of his own religious conviction, Cave says that the struggle is the point: "I would say I'm in the process of conversion," he tells Powers. Wherever he is on that road, he's found something ecstatic to share. Click here to read a transcript of this interview and hear songs from the album Wild God.