Burt is a professor at Harvard who has written 14 books of poetry and criticism.  In this book, she attempts to convince readers to not be afraid of poetry by making the point that there is no such thing as ‘poetry’.  Rather there is a universe of poetic form and themes.  She goes on to organize her book into the major themes of feelings, characters, forms, difficulty, wisdom, and community.  As the review in The New Yorker described the book, “At once erudite and colloquial, the book resists prescriptive judgments, teems with surprising juxtapositions, and evokes the contagious enthusiasm of a cool teacher.”

Drawing heavily on the poems of John Donne, Burt contrasts them with contemporary poets and topics of current interest—sexual identity, minority struggles, and international and national politics and violence.  Perhaps because I came to Burt after a long read through Edward Hirsch’s book about poetry, I didn’t have the patience required for the close reading this book deserved.  I think part of the difficulty I had is also related to her choice of poets and poems.  Where the first poem quoted at length in Hirsch’s book was Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Art of Losing’, one of my favorites, Burt’s first lengthy quote is from the work of  Tommy Pico, a Brooklyn-based gay writer who identifies as “Kumeyaay NDN (“Indian”) in a poem filled with obscenities and the promise to ‘trash the place’.

I’m sure the book has many positives but this reader struggled to find them.