As Easy as Lying: Essays on Poetry

After three volumes of verse and three academic monographs, the formidable H.L. Hix (Surely As Birds Fly) collects his polished, earnest prose about poetry in As Easy As Lying. Hix admonishes fans of one kind of poetry to try and read all the others, and unpacks refreshing admiration for thinkers (Charles Bernstein, for example) whose tastes and positions seem far from his own. Discussion of how poets think and what young poets should read sit (sometimes uneasily) beside collections of Wittgenstein-esque aphorisms, short takes on new poets' work, and intelligent if now dated essays on the past and future of the New Formalist movement from which Hix's first admirers emerged.