Product Description

Modern poetry is often represented as difficult or remote from most people's experience. This is a passionate attempt to introduce and examine all aspects of contemporary poetry and make it a familiar part of our lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58789 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
'Her introduction will come to be seen as the summary of the age. I haven't seen any description of where and who we are that's as clear, balanced and inspiring.' Jo Shapcott 'Many of us who like poetry but are ignorant about how a good poem is put together have learned to read unfamiliar poetry with greater understanding as a result of this weekly analysis. An Independent on Sunday reader

Back in 1999, Ruth Padel, poet and writer, began a weekly poetry column in The Independent on Sunday. This was an experiment to introduce modern poetry to the many people who felt sidelined by it, believing it 'difficult' or 'elitist'. What began as a six-week trial ran for two and a half years, during which time Padel was deluged with letters, phone calls and e-mails from readers who declared she had completely changed their response to modern verse. This is a selection of 52 poems and the related articles. Padel suggests ways of interpreting each poem, from a syntactical point of view and also from close analysis of the text. She provides some details of each poet's background, with reference to their other work and explains how the poem under discussion fits into the canon. Yet this outstanding book is far from just being a study guide. Padel's intention is to make the glorious diversity of modern poetry accessible to all, whatever their intellectual background. In the challenging essay that prefaces the poems she demystifies poetic style and structure in a lucid explanation of metre, rhyme and rhythm. She revels in unveiling the hidden rhyme patterns in the poems she discusses, and her boundless enthusiasm is infectious. She never attempts to claim her personal reading of a given poem is to be taken as gospel - in fact, alternative viewpoints from her readers fill her with delight. The poems have all been published in Britain, although the poets themselves come from all over the world. There are as many women as men represented, influential poets whose work has on occasion been dismissed as 'formless' and 'whimsical'. Ruth Padel has no truck with such criticism, and points out how women poets are often misunderstood and under-represented, simply because their poems are read and interpreted by men. There are poems about the enormous issues of death, sex and love, families and war. But there are also poems about feeling fat on the beach, a blind man making a cup of coffee, the loneliness of listening to the shipping forecast. For those of us who missed out on the chance to read her columns, Padel's collection will become a much-loved friend, to be returned to again and again for her wisdom, her perception and her unrestrained passion for poetry. (Kirkus UK)

An Independent on Sunday reader
‘Many of us... have learned to read unfamiliar poetry with greater understanding as a result of this weekly analysis.'

Times
"She chooses her poems with impeccable taste, an anthologist of the very best contemporary poetry"

Customer Reviews

fascinating and helpful to the common reader
Although I do buy some modern poetry much of the stuff that gets published seems to be written for a tiny clique, and few (other than Wendy Cope and Carol Anne Duffy) are as immediately accesible as Philip Larkin. The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, never gets a poem printed without a ton of derision from hacks, which doesn't help those who'd like to find out if anyone new is as good as the poets we read at school and university.

Ruth Padel's collection, taken from a weekly newspaper column in the Independent on Sunday is therefore a real thrill, whether you're a student trying to find out how to approach modern poetry or an interested but bewildered reader. She puts modern poetry into a literary and historical context, with a light, witty touch, and explores 52 poems line by line, with a bit about each poet as introduction. Her own metaphors in doing so are sometimes as good as anything in the poem - I loved her description of Peter Redgrove's "playful love poem" to The Visible Baby "offering its own bright images and spell-like repetitions like a coloured mobile."

Though not, I imagine, includsive of all good modern poets this is a terrific way in.

This is as good a place to start as any
After 35 years since reading poetry for A levels I found it hard to get back into reading poetry, and modern poetry in particular. What were the "rules", what were the boundaries, what the hell was going on?
I found that this books interesting introductory essay, helpful and soothing (I wasn't as far off the mark as I thought I was).

However it was Ms Padel's analysis of the poems along with a brief biography of each poet that I found most helpful and easily applicable to other poems.
Most importantly, I found myself as a male, reading female poets with enjoyment and interest instead of my usual defensive, faint bewilderment.

Highly recommended for the nervous and bewildered.

Not what it says on the cover!
This book is not 52 ways of looking at a poem, it is 52 ways of looking at 52 poems. The difference may sound slight, but it's not. There is no progression of learning from one poem to the next, as each is treated individually.

If like me you are a 'poetry virgin who wonders what all the excitement is about' (back cover blurb), and someone who is sceptical of the whole 'poetry thing', you will find that this book simply reinforces the unattainable essence of poetry.

In the introduction, Ruth Padel makes a big effort to try and convince the reader of how 'exciting' modern poetry is, how 'accessible' it is: "It's Not that Difficult, Not Elitist, Obscure or Irrelevant: and It's Written for You" (pg.55). Unfortunately, she fails miserably by having to interpret each of the 52 poems - but doesn't have 'insider' knowledge from the poets of what the poems are about. This leaves us really with one poets interpretation (review) of another poets work. For example, the 'line by line' exploration mentioned by other reviews (for a different version) is inaccurate, as there is no line-by-line exploration (except where elements of technical technique are mentioned), and sometimes nothing other than guesses, as in the explanation of the third poem: "Are we in a monastery? And what brass fenders? Are they gleaming in the monastery kitchen, is he planning to retire to a villa with log fires, or are we talking vintage cars? The point is, we cannot know."

On the positive side, if you are studying poetry or are intending to do so, this is a good book, and I did learn something from the introduction about various techniques to help dedicated poetry enthusiasts to interpret poems. What the book thoroughly failed to do was convince me that I should put the necessary effort into researching poetry enough to understand it. Quite the opposite in fact. For example, I would have to know (or research) that "After months of jaw jaw, ..." echoes Winston Churchill's words "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war" in order to understand what the poet is inferring. Maybe this comes naturally to the author's Independent on Sunday readers.

Possibly what irritates me the most about this book is that Ruth Padel recognises why poetry is struggling but does nothing about it other than to reinforce the effort required to 'get into' poetry: "You have to have time, and something like solitude, to go into and out of a poem, turn it over, think about it. ... At work, most people now have an exhausting reading load. Even doctors have to spend longer reading patients' notes on screen than attending to the lesion those notes are about. I asked a fifty-year-old barrister ... why he never read poetry now. 'Because of all the other stuff I have to read,' he said. 'Piles of papers ... The last thing I want to do after that is open a book, especially something you have to concentrate on.'"

If, like me, you were looking for a book to inspire you to read (or write) poetry, this is not the book for you.