Amazon.com Review
Peter Stitt, a distinguished critic as well as the editor of the Gettysburg Review, has put together a fascinating study of five contemporary American poets: John Ashberry, Stephen Dobyns, Charles Simic, Gerald Stern, and Charles Wright. Stitt examines the writers' habitual strategies, subject matters, resonances to larger cultural issues, and aesthetic strengths and weaknesses. It's tough to make generalizations about an extant literary period, but by focusing his observations on these five poets, Stitt makes some modest, reasonable claims about the current state of poetry that are supported by strong readings of the poems themselves.
