De/Compositions

W. D. Snodgrass

I figured, when I put this on reserve at the library, that Snodgrass was going to take poems from otherwise excellent (or, in some cases, overrated; it's about time a serious critic finally takes Emily Dickinson to task for every one of her poems being able to be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas") poets and breaking down what went wrong in them. I was wrong, and what I got was far finer: Snodgrass rewrites 101 poems, taking out the things that make them brilliant and turning them into everything from mediocre sludge to hysterically bad self-parody. In doing so, he highlights what is so wonderful about so many excellent poems better than thousands of pages of explication could; two or three pages of explication at the end of each section is included for clarity and closing notes, to highlight a change or two, but otherwise, Snodgrass lets the poems and their deconstructions (also, the occasional rough draft from the original poet) speak for themselves.

I cannot overstate the importance of this book for the working poet. It should be required reading for everyone who's ever written a poem with any pretense to greatness, and for most, it should be on the short shelf of sacred reference books to which the poet will turn hundreds, maybe thousands, of times over the course of his career. No finer book on (or of) poetry crossed my desk this year; very few finer have ever crossed it. It makes my top five books of the year.