The title of The Making of a Poem and its blurb ("this collection is as instructive for the novice as it is inspiring for the practised poet") suggest yet another manual for poets in need of improved technique and increased verse drive. Well-intentioned though such books are - passionately proffering "exercises to get you started", "tips to overcome writer's block", "springboards for the imagination" - sceptics may regard their purpose as uncannily close in spirit to that of pornography as defined by Germaine Greer: "to arouse desire in the absence of desire, to raise appetite where no hunger exists". Happily, The Making of a Poem proves to be a book of a different order, an "anthology of poetic forms" devoting generous space to representative poems and briefly surveying their prosody and history. It provides a feast for any reader gripped by a hunger for poetry's rhythms and revelations, rather than its potential as a raffish "career option".
The poems in the first section of The Making of a Poem are categorised according to the technical means they employ: villanelle, sestina, pantoum, sonnet, ballad, blank verse, heroic couplet and stanza. After a chapter on poetic feet, which moves at anapaestic speed and might have been called "Metre at a Gallop" rather than "Metre at a Glance", the volume concludes with "Shaping Forms" (instances of the elegy, the pastoral, the ode) and "Open Forms". Some individual poems are plucked from the crowd for a cursory inspection and dusting down. Of course, the book's categories are far from exhaustive - a section on love poetry would have added fervour to the proceedings; and the pastoral section could have responded more fully to the healthy ecological twist which contemporary poets such as Wendell Berry have given this tradition. Mary Oliver's "The Black Walnut Tree", in which "something brighter than money/moves in our blood", is an eco-poem as distinctive as an Elizabethan echo-poem.
When handled with mastery, form melts into content and does not draw attention to itself. Less accomplished authors of villanelles and sestinas expend so much energy in observing the baroque rules and in mechanically propelling the poem forward that the finished work collapses with exhaustion on the page. Significantly many contemporary poets - among them the book's editors, Eavan Boland and Mark Strand - enjoy large reputations without needing to constantly conquer the more vertiginous peaks of poetic form. This reinforces my conviction that their book is more useful to voracious readers than to predatory writers, to those who will forget that Anthony Hecht's "The Book of Yolek" is a sestina, so seamlessly (like body and soul) are its virtuosic form and heart-rending content intertwined.
Furthermore, fledgling writers who treat The Making of a Poem as a practitioners' handbook may find themselves as intimidated by the rules of a form like the villanelle ("The third line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the third and fifth stanzas. [The] two refrain lines follow each other to become the second-to-last and last lines of the poem . . . ") as a tourist attempting to learn the steps of a Connemara jig set from a dance manual. Only when we are unable to tell the dancer from the dance can we be confident that the writer has found his or her poetic feet.
Books on studying form now proliferate because of the creative writing industry - the only sure-bet growth sector in poetry. Instead of talking away their poems in dingy pubs, poets now earnestly discuss their creations at softly-lit workshops in ivy league universities and breeze-block arts centres. It is generally conceded that, although one cannot teach somebody to be a poet, technical aspects of verse (such as metre and form) can certainly be imparted. But, as the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz remarked, "Form in poetry has many uses; one of them is, like refrigeration, to preserve bad meat". While form is absolutely fundamental to poetry, it would require a combined Nobel Prize in Literature and Chemistry to devise a formula for calculating the ratio of formal proficiency to overall poetical quality in any specimen masterpiece.
Contemporary British poets - including younger writers like Simon Armitage, Sophie Hannah, Don Paterson and Glyn Maxwell - can handle every aspect of form with a nonchalance which makes the vast majority of their American counterparts seem laboured; one misses these poets and virtuosos like James Fenton, John Fuller, Peter Reading and George Szirtes from The Making of a Poem. The Irish selection is laudably wide-ranging but, given the book's emphasis on poetic forms, it is surprising to find no Richard Murphy sonnet, no "HMS Belfast" by Ciaran Carson to raise its voice with the ballads, no Michael Longley tactfully gracing the elegy section, no "Antarctica" by Derek Mahon to illustrate the villanelle at its chilling best, not even Paul Muldoon in his role as "Prince of Serendip".
Despite these shortcomings, readers who turn to this book for "a draught of vintage" will savour the selections from Keats, Sidney, Herbert, Dickinson, Moore and numerous others (including the 16th-century Barnabe Barnes with an ingenious echopoem). A well-known poet - it was Mark Strand, come to think of it - told an interviewer, "There's far too much written. People should take a sabbatical from writing and do more reading." Maybe, when it appears in paperback, he and Eavan Boland will consider re-naming their informative and pleasurable book The Reading of a Poem.
Dennis O'Driscoll is a poet and critic. Gallery Press will publish a selection of his essays and reviews next year