The Poetry of Life: And the Life of Poetry - Softcover

David Mason was co-winner of the 1991 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize with his book, The Buried Houses. His second book, The Country I Remember, won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award in 1996. With Mark Jarman, he edited Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, which is now in its fourth printing, and in 2002 he issued his collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry. He teaches at Colorado College.

Remarkably non-effete and pro-populist essays on contemporary poetry. Although prizewinning poet/essayist Mason (English/Colorado Coll.) has worked with the classics, he has a particular fondness for the verse of Ireland, America, and the West Indies. Mason, a post-post-modern, considers the poets biography (``The force of personality is every bit as important as the mastery of craft'') even when studying the father of formalism, T.S. Eliot. He doesn't merely state that Auden struggles to be free of Yeats' bardic influence; he demonstrates how ``Atlantis'' is a ``comic revision'' of ``Sailing to Byzantium.'' Slouching back to the Iliad, Mason reveals its hidden complexities and contemporary sense of living in an anguished personal present. A poet like Tennyson was overly popular in his own present, yet Mason defends him as an artist of superior technique and genuine emotion, then performs similar salvage work on Whittier and Longfellow. He nominates not-yet-poet Herman Melville as the best poet of the Civil War, and proclaims that Emma Lazarus's sonnet on the Statue of Liberty deserves to be cast in bronze. He compares Seamus Heaney, Irish and only 58, to Robert Frost, citing the ``use of colloquial speech in their poetry, refreshing rhythm and idiom with materials that are at least partly extra-literary.'' Poets like Heaney who are political but highly skillful, he concludes, can also compose masterpieces. As for Frost, Mason sees him as playing with his critics, who consider him a neurotic outdoorsman, and getting in many serious laughs. Venturing into more recent work, Mason praises Louis Simpson, Anne Sexton, J.V. Cunningham, and Thomas McGraththough he criticizes the well-regarded Charles Wright as dull and undramaticand concludes by saluting fellow West Coaster John Haines. A refreshingly new and iconoclastic voice seeking to rescue poetry from its status as an obscure, narcissistic art form. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.