Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
fascinating and helpful to the common reader, 12 Jan 2003
Although I do buy some modern poetry much of the stuff that gets published seems to be written for a tiny clique, and few (other than Wendy Cope and Carol Anne Duffy) are as immediately accesible as Philip Larkin. The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, never gets a poem printed without a ton of derision from hacks, which doesn't help those who'd like to find out if anyone new is as good as the poets we read at school and university.Ruth Padel's collection, taken from a weekly newspaper column in the Independent on Sunday is therefore a real thrill, whether you're a student trying to find out how to approach modern poetry or an interested but bewildered reader. She puts modern poetry into a literary and historical context, with a light, witty touch, and explores 52 poems line by line, with a bit about each poet as introduction. Her own metaphors in doing so are sometimes as good as anything in the poem - I loved her description of Peter Redgrove's "playful love poem" to The Visible Baby "offering its own bright images and spell-like repetitions like a coloured mobile." Though not, I imagine, includsive of all good modern poets this is a terrific way in.
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57 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is as good a place to start as any, 21 Jul 2002
By A Customer
After 35 years since reading poetry for A levels I found it hard to get back into reading poetry, and modern poetry in particular. What were the "rules", what were the boundaries, what the hell was going on?
I found that this books interesting introductory essay, helpful and soothing (I wasn't as far off the mark as I thought I was).However it was Ms Padel's analysis of the poems along with a brief biography of each poet that I found most helpful and easily applicable to other poems.
Most importantly, I found myself as a male, reading female poets with enjoyment and interest instead of my usual defensive, faint bewilderment. Highly recommended for the nervous and bewildered.
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6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not what it says on the cover!, 3 April 2008
This book is not 52 ways of looking at a poem, it is 52 ways of looking at 52 poems. The difference may sound slight, but it's not. There is no progression of learning from one poem to the next, as each is treated individually.
If like me you are a 'poetry virgin who wonders what all the excitement is about' (back cover blurb), and someone who is sceptical of the whole 'poetry thing', you will find that this book simply reinforces the unattainable essence of poetry.
In the introduction, Ruth Padel makes a big effort to try and convince the reader of how 'exciting' modern poetry is, how 'accessible' it is: "It's Not that Difficult, Not Elitist, Obscure or Irrelevant: and It's Written for You" (pg.55). Unfortunately, she fails miserably by having to interpret each of the 52 poems - but doesn't have 'insider' knowledge from the poets of what the poems are about. This leaves us really with one poets interpretation (review) of another poets work. For example, the 'line by line' exploration mentioned by other reviews (for a different version) is inaccurate, as there is no line-by-line exploration (except where elements of technical technique are mentioned), and sometimes nothing other than guesses, as in the explanation of the third poem: "Are we in a monastery? And what brass fenders? Are they gleaming in the monastery kitchen, is he planning to retire to a villa with log fires, or are we talking vintage cars? The point is, we cannot know."
On the positive side, if you are studying poetry or are intending to do so, this is a good book, and I did learn something from the introduction about various techniques to help dedicated poetry enthusiasts to interpret poems. What the book thoroughly failed to do was convince me that I should put the necessary effort into researching poetry enough to understand it. Quite the opposite in fact. For example, I would have to know (or research) that "After months of jaw jaw, ..." echoes Winston Churchill's words "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war" in order to understand what the poet is inferring. Maybe this comes naturally to the author's Independent on Sunday readers.
Possibly what irritates me the most about this book is that Ruth Padel recognises why poetry is struggling but does nothing about it other than to reinforce the effort required to 'get into' poetry: "You have to have time, and something like solitude, to go into and out of a poem, turn it over, think about it. ... At work, most people now have an exhausting reading load. Even doctors have to spend longer reading patients' notes on screen than attending to the lesion those notes are about. I asked a fifty-year-old barrister ... why he never read poetry now. 'Because of all the other stuff I have to read,' he said. 'Piles of papers ... The last thing I want to do after that is open a book, especially something you have to concentrate on.'"
If, like me, you were looking for a book to inspire you to read (or write) poetry, this is not the book for you.
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