Comprehensive Anthology Reveals Age-Old Poetic Ideas

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Compiled by three noted poets, Deborah Brown, Annie Finch, and celebrated poet Maxine Kumin, "Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics" (University of Arkansas Press, Cloth $54.95, Paper $24.95) is an eclectic, stimulating and informed selection of poets’ remarks on poetry spanning eras, ethnicities and aesthetics. The 102 selections from nearly as many poets reach back to the Greeks and Romans, then draw on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Milton, on to Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Poe, then Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Rilke, and Pound, concluding with many of our contemporaries, including Hall, Clifton, Mackey, Kunitz, and Rukeyser.

The book is divided into three sections. "Musing" concerns issues of inspiration; "Making," issues of craft, from diction to meter to persona and voice; and "Mapping," the role of poetry and the poet. Headnotes at the beginning of each selection provide background information about the poet and commentary on the significance of the selection. As Hilda Raz, editor of "Prairie Schooner," describes it, "Kumin and her co-editors have given us exactly what we need. We who teach and write, edit and read will use 'Lofty Dogmas’ in full knowledge of wisdom in the gathering and delight in the words."

Deborah Brown is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester and author of "News from the Grate." Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Southern Maine, and the author of a number of books, including "Eve." Maxine Kumin is one of America’s most distinguished poets. A past poet laureate of the U.S., she counts among her many awards a Pulitzer Prize and a Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize. She is the author of many poetry collections, including "Jack and Other New Poems."