Book review: Discovering what makes poems pulsate with living heartbeats

She looks at “The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws” by Wallace Stevens. She always loved his work but that poem baffled her when she was younger. It seemed surreal to her until she wondered “what was the work of the poet demanding of me ? It was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world. To do that, one must believe that every word in a poem is,within the poem, literally true, and the first step must be to collect the literal facts from the words.”

Vendler shows us how the feelings in that poem reflected where the poet was in his personal life. She observes “most poems that touch a reader originate in a pang. (As Stevens said, ‘One reads poetry with one’s nerves.’) The pang is the nucleus generating the poet’s literal bird. The pang is not ‘hidden.’ It is usually-as it is here-in plain view.”

In the essay “Art and Anger” she analyzes “The Middle-Aged,” an early poem by Adrienne Rich. It contains the seething lines “Signs of possession and of being possessed, We tasted, tense with envy.” Vendler recognizes that “The tyranny of the socially unsayable is a pervasive theme in the work of some fiery writers, and the anger provoking their fury often creates, in their verse, problems of tone.”

She presents us with Sylvia Plath’s poem “Morning Song” with the lines “All night your moth-breath...Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.” It was written a year after Plath’s baby was born as the poet was making the transition from wife to mother. Plath had lost her first child through a miscarriage and Vendler guides us across the emotional landscapes of this iconic, tragic poet.

In the essay “Forced to Smile” she examines the poem “Epitaph on a Hare” by William Cowper. As someone who recently laid to rest a much beloved animal companion this one really resonated with me. She calls this poem “the most original epitaph for a pet in English literature.”

These sparkling essays take readers inside the lives and works of the poets you’ll encounter in this suberb collection.