The Value of Poetry

Reviews / Votes

'Drawing on an ample range of contemporary sources, Falci explores how poetry uses its formal wiles and intuitive craft to respond to the world it must answer to and which inflects its thinking, language choices and physical stance. A stylish, provocative and exhilarating book, it will serve both poets and readers to probe the effects of a good poem, and how it succeeds in achieving them.' Vona Groarke, The University of Manchester 'This is a formidably intelligent, packed, articulate and rewarding book...Conceptually omnicompetent in poetics, it is also, in its local observations, technically precise and questioning. It is a state-of-the-art investigation which is also independent and takes nothing for granted.' John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge 'A powerful, eloquent defense of poetry, alive to its intricacy, complexity, and variety, this book offers a riveting account of poetry's special strengths and capacities. Falci illuminates poetry's play, materiality, and formal resources; its staging of subjectivity's fractured multiplicity; its intertwining of thought and feeling; and its drive to recollect the irretrievable past. Grounded in rich, multivalent readings of contemporary poems of many different kinds, this is one of the very best recent books on poetry.' Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia '... the value of The Value of Poetry lies in its unpredictable transformations of diverse poems into shared reading experiences of contemporary media and format rather than lyricized linguistic objects.' Ben Glaser, Modern Philology