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On Poetry

‘On Poetry’ was a commission from Oberon for their Masters Series of volumes for the general reader, written by experts in various genres. It is an attempt to compress everything of value learned from the writing, reading, and teaching of poetry in the last 35 years. The chapter titles (White, Black, Form, Pulse, Chime, Space and Time) consider various facets of the craft, including metre, tone, rhyme, theatre writing, et al. The final chapter, ‘Time’, is entirely composed of new poems in various forms, by way of illustrating the uses of these forms. The first two chapters look at the origin and essence of verse as the rendering of human response to existence in forms constructed over time. The central thesis of the book is that the poetry which derives from the natural processes and realities encountered by humankind (e.g. heartbeat, respiration, footfall, day and night, the seasons) is the work that has tended to endure: that the survival of the sonnet, the pentameter, the ballad, rhyme, is a result of their connection to these processes and realities. It is the human presence and communication in poetry that tends to make it survive; the book is implicitly sceptical of approaches that obscure this connection. As well as quoting extensively from the canon, the book also traces the progress of four more or less fictional writing students, whose travails are based on personal experience. Each represents a type of young writer, and is seen undergoing exercises that have been proven in high-level academic contexts over the years. The style of the book is intentionally informal, even playful, aimed as it is at a wide general readership, yet it is intended to serve as a serious critical aid to the aspiring poet, as well as a guidebook for the curious.