Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems

In this eloquent literary primer, Burt, a poet and Harvard English professor, contends with poetry’s reputation for inaccessibility. Beginning by proposing readers think in terms of individual works rather than poetry in general, Burt goes on to discuss a wide selection of practitioners, from past masters including W.B. Yeats and Langston Hughes to such contemporary figures as Cathy Park Hong and Terrance Hayes, to support her argument that all readers can find poetic voices and styles agreeable to them. Her selections also show an awareness of the historic underrepresentation of different groups, in terms of races, sexual preference, and languages, in American poetry. The writing falters at times, as when an attempt to seem current with a reference to Pokémon comes across as patronizing. Burt’s writing is best when deeply enmeshed in a poem, such as John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” used to critique modern preconceptions about plainspokeness being the most sincere way of speaking; she describes the 17th-century work’s “elaborate, challenging metaphors not as barriers to sincerity but as ways to achieve it.” Burt’s sweeping, insightful survey makes a great case that with wider exposure, people will discover how poems can be relevant to anyone who has “ever felt unique, or confused, or confusing to others.” (May)