Best Words, Best Order, 2nd Edition: Essays on Poetry Reviews

Best Words, Best Order, 2nd Edition: Essays on Poetry





Stephen Dobyns, a poet and teacher, has the rare ability to speak to readers about his art. In this new edition of Best Words, Best Order, Dobyns further explains the mystery of the poet's work. Through essays on memory and metaphor; pacing; the intri-cacies of voice and tone; and thoughtful appreciations of Chekhov, Ritsos, Mandelstam, and Rilke, Dobyns guides readers and writers through poetry's mysterious twilight communiqus. For this new second edition, Dobyns has added two new essays, one dealing with the idea of beauty in poetry and another on the almost mystical way poets connect seemingly dis-parate things in a single poem. Anyone interested in the beauty and intricacy of writing and poetry will find great pleasure in this new edition of an enduring classic.As its title implies, Stephen Dobyns's rigorous collection of essays about poetry celebrates Coleridge's dictum that poetry is the best words in the best order. Dobyns's probing examinations of the elements of poetry--metaphor, pacing, tone--and his study of the evolution of free verse are not for Sunday-sunset versifiers. They are strenuous, meaty, and wholly satisfying fare, intended for serious students of poetry. Dobyns, the author of eight volumes of poetry (and 17 novels), believes, like Baudelaire, that "each poem ... has an optimum number of words [and] an optimum number of pieces of information ... and to go over or under even by one word weakens the whole." Poetry, he says, belongs to the reader, not the writer, and as readers, "at the close of the poem, we must not only feel that our expectations have been met but that our lives have been increased, if only to a small degree." And, if that's not challenge enough for the writer, add to it "that the conclusion of a given piece must appear both inevitable and surprising." The final third of the book comprises chapters on four writers, each of whom represents to Dobyns an ideal in poetry: Rainer Maria Rilke, who Dobyns says worked harder than any other poet to develop and change his work; Osip Mandelstam, an exemplar of moral centeredness; Anton Chekhov, for his sense of personal freedom; and Yannis Ritsos, for his "sense of the mystery that surrounds us."









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