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.
Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets FROM THE PUBLISHER
Stitt's interest in these five poets is intellectual and aesthetic. As he states, "I chose these particular writers because their work continues to interest me deeply, both intellectually and formally, even after years of familiarity." He uses his understanding of the philosophical implications inherent in modern physics, as they apply to both content and form, as the basis for his close analysis. Stitt attends to the poet's writerly strategies so that we may discover in their poetry where "surface form" intersects and complements meaning and thus becomes, in John Berryman's terms, "deep form". He explains what these poets say and how they say it and what relationships lie between. He also shows how humor plays a part in some of their work.
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