Description
Book Synopsis* An innovative introduction to writing poetry designed for students of creative writing and budding poets alike. * Challenges the reader's sense of what is possible in a poem. * Traces the history and highlights the potential of poetry.
Trade Review"John Redmond's "
How to Write a Poem" contains no false notes. He does not patronise his reader with easy examples or workshop games, but lights on his subject with elegant pragmatism and humility. His overall argument arises from a very personal yet wholly professional sense of poetry as an art form in practice, and his examples are informed by deep reading and writerly intuition. I consider the book a small masterpiece of clarity, economy and experience. It brings light to poetry as something made: something real and realised."
David Morley, Warwick University "The examples throughout the book are contemporary and provocative in the most helpful sense. ... [Redmond] clearly loves poems, enough to show you in detail how they work." Poetry News
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements.
Introduction.
1. The Question of Address.
2. Viewpoint.
3. The Question of Voices.
4. The Question of Scale.
5. Uses of Repetition.
6. Image.
7. Short Lines.
8. Long Lines.
9. Diction.
10. Uses of Syntax.
11. Tone.
12. Traditional Forms: Ode.
13. Traditional Forms: Epistle.
14. The Question of Background.
15. Conclusion: The Question of Variety.
Index
