Mark Strand and Eavan Boland (Eds.)
'Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms'

Reviewed by Debra Hely
(Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, New York 2000)

Strand and Boland are successful poets and have a passion for their art which is reflected in everything about this book. This book is for lovers of poetry; whether they want to understand more about the art of writing poetry of simply enjoy reading good poems.

Apart from collaborating the editors also get a brief chapter each which invites the reader to share their passion for poetry and poetic forms. Strand writes "a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves," (xxiv). Boland expresses how "exciting it is to find that a poetic language will liberate and not constrain," (xxix).

Their ethos behind the book is simple: "verse forms do not define poetic form: they simply express it," (3). Each poetic form is neatly summed up on a single page, then the reader can learn about its history before learning about the form in a contemporary context. This is followed by an anthology for each form, anywhere from eleven to thirty-three poems are given as examples. Overall there are 196 poems from 182 poets (with a brief biography on each poet used), including Shakespeare, Milton and Blake as well as contemporary poets like Elizabeth Bishop; Charles Simic; Sylvia Plath and Australian poets Judith Wright and Les Murray.

The forms covered in this book are: The Villanelle; The Sestina; The Pantoum; The Sonnet; The Ballad; Blank Verse; The Heroic Couplet; The Stanza; The Elegy; The Pastoral; The Ode and Open Forms. Two further chapters are devoted to Meter and Shaping Forms. Most chapters include a close up look at one of the poems from the anthology.

This is a book any lover of poetry would love to have on their book shelf, or rather in their hands to read and reread.

—Debra Hely

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