For the poets among you. ( )

This slim volume contains the words of great poets (Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings, May Swenson and more), as well as beautifully crafted sentences. The chapter "Description's Alphabet" is genius. Two favorite quotes: "Description is an ART to the degree that it gives us not just the world but the inner life of the witness." "ECONOMY is a virtue, albeit an overrated one ... EXCESS, which is seldom understood to be a virtue, can certainly be a pleasure." ( )

With this collection of thoughts and essays. Mark Doty shows that not only is he a fine poet, he is also a great explicator of poetry and advocate for its craft. He argues effectively for description of the world and the inner experience of it, and the informing of each by the other.

Doty also points to a critical problem with so much current poetry:

"Startling, to go description-hunting and realize that I can thumb through whole books of recent poems with very little evocation of sense perception within them. Why is this the case? I declare myself here on the side of allegiance to the sensible, things as they are, the given, the incompletely knowable, never to get done or get it right or render it whole: ours to say and say. The mightiest of our resources brought to the task, to make the world real."

There is a loss of faith in the ability of language to be more than solipsistic, and a concomitant loss in the craft of making things sensible in both definitions of the word:

"Now everybody in creation mistrusts language, and half the poems we read make a nod toward the unsayable. What’s to be done? Language won’t do what we wish it would, but we have nothing else—so we have to go forward and behave as if it could do what we wanted (with some faith in the miraculous fact that it does, from time to time, give us a “Song of Myself” or a Tender Buttons, something the world wouldn’t be the same without).
"Perhaps we can inhabit the interesting middle ground that lies between, on the one side, giving up on referentiality altogether, and, on the other, cleaving to an outdated notion that words can be controlled, can say what we mean to say when we wish to make use of them."

This a book for lovers of beautiful words and the desperate craft of believing that their distillation in unexpected liquors still makes life more alive. ( )

I stupidly hadn't realized this little book was about poetry before I started reading. I'm not a poet, and I hate poetic analysis, so I was unimpressed by the number of pages Doty dedicated to criticism. That said, those pages were very well done, so if I was a poet, I probably would have been wowed.

What I enjoyed the most about this book was the "Description's Alphabet," an A to Z assemblage of random thoughts on description that I found readily applicable to prose as well as poetry. Hooray.

It's definitely a sophisticated book on craft--I'd recommend it to a poet looking to take their art to another level. Not so much to someone looking to start dabbling in poetry ( )

This small, potent volume (part of The Art of Series edited by the phenomenal writer and critic Charles Baxter) is essential for anyone who cares about writing, poetry and/or the art of description. Even if you're not a poet or a writer, these short essays include thoughts on nature, seeing, art, philosophy and consciousness. A brief and brilliant work by one of America's foremost poets. ( )