Orr, the poetry columnist for TNYT Sunday Book Review takes a stab at demystifying modern poetry, but in an ironic outcome, he makes it more complex than before he started.  With great humor and erudition, he takes the reader through chapters on the personal, the political, form, ambition, and the fishbowl as follows: Personal:  not coincident with confessional poetry but related to the poet’s willingness to be embarassed by revealing himself; Political:  unknowable is the use to which a poet’s words will be applied, though always engaged in the battle; Form:  meter, resemblance, mechanical forms are addressed in the best chapter in the book; Ambition: involving a striving and conception of greatness, Orr cites Donald Hall’s article in 1983 in the Kenyon Review urging poets “to make words that live forever,…to be as great as Dante….The only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.”  He contrasts Lowell and Bishop; Fishbowl:  Talks about the bind for the university professor poet bound to his institution and to society with their conflicting responsibilities.  Great quote:  “In the end, we’re left with the realization tht much of life is devoted to things that in the end don’t matter very much, except to us.  …Out of such small, unnecessary devotions is the abundance of our lives sometimes made evident.”