Customer Reviews

Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry In Traditional Form

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I belong to a private online poetry group, and I turn again and again to these poems to share them with my friends. Nothing can substitute for having the collected or selected poems of a single author, but this anthology is unlike any other I've ever seen. Philip Dacey and David Jauss have selected, within the strictures of their chosen subject, an incredible emotional range, from the outright camp of Miller William's Rubaiyat for Sue Ella Tucker (Sue Ella Tucker was barely in her teens./ She often minded her mother. She didn't know beans/ About what boys can do. She laughed like air./ Already the world was crawling up her jeans...) to the hair-raising Rapist's Villanelle by Thomas M. Disch.

I would think this book would be extremely useful to a student of traditional poetry for exploring different forms; the appendices offer very clear explanations of each form and include a mini-index of the poems in the book that use a particular form. There are, for example, seven poems that qualify as hymnal stanzas, five pantoums, and all kinds of quatrains of various sorts: envelope quatrains, Sicilian quatrains, etc.

I see that Amazon charges $48 for this book. Sometimes it's hard to pass over a chunk of change that large for a book, but you've got to believe me, this one is worth it.

Being aware of the craft of writing heightens the appreciation of it. Poetry is a powerful, condensed form of writing, and traditional forms of poetry create a framework that this power presses against. Strong Measures is a fine anthology of modern American poets who work within these forms. Beginning with an accessable introduction to the history of poetic form, followed by examples by over 150 contemporary poets, and ending with an appendix explaining meter, scansion, form definition, and a classification of the poems by form, this is a wonderful reference book for anyone who wants to know where that resonance in what they just read came from.

Strong Measures is still by far the best anthology of forms, far surpassing Strand and Boland's (which actually claims blank verse is seldom used in the 20th century) and Finch's (too few examples, too much blather). I'd love to see a new edition. I wish Longman would put a reasonable price tag on this book, as most students will never be able to afford the whopping $100.20 now being charged for it.

I am a student of poetry currently in a workshop on forms and this book is amazing. Not only does it have excellent poems in forms from a wide range of serious writers, but in the index it has a list of forms featured in the book, what exactly makes up the form, and refers you to examples of each in the book. I'm sure I will use it years after this one.