New Poems of Emily Dickinson

Shurr ( The Marriage of Emily Dickinson ) carries one step further Thomas H. Johnson's practice of extracting poetic passages from the prose of Dickinson. Scrupulously reading her letters for passages that contain her familiar iambics, meter or punctuation, Shurr gathers nearly 500 such ``excavations,'' which he has altered minimally to conform with Dickinson's ``usual poetic lines.'' In addition, he isolates such categories as riddles and epigrams: ``I thought your approbation Fame- / and it's withdrawal Infamy.'' The brevity and visual intensity of many short pieces show Dickinson as a precursor of the Imagists. But instead of letting the excerpts speak for themselves, Shurr fleshes them out with other poetic excerpts that require contextual explanation and ``workshop'' fragments that, he tells us, would have made excellent poems had they been further developed. A repetitive discussion of Dickinson's form and metric structure prefaces chapters as well as individual works. Such academic posturing interferes with the reader's casual enjoyment of much of the material here, which falls so naturally into poetry it's difficult to imagine it as anything else. (Sept.)