Trust them - they are poetry professionals

The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland (WW Norton, £19.95)

On National Poetry Day (Thursday 5 October), many poets up and down the country rediscover some sense of purpose. The business of poetry, they finally discover, does not rest in trying to persuade people to buy their own woefully undervalued and under-promoted books of deathless lyrics. It is to teach the young about the virtues of the ancient art of becoming and (sooner than you'd think) being a poet - within the brief span of five or six lessons, one per class, with the rowdies on the wrong side of the door.

On National Poetry Day (Thursday 5 October), many poets up and down the country rediscover some sense of purpose. The business of poetry, they finally discover, does not rest in trying to persuade people to buy their own woefully undervalued and under-promoted books of deathless lyrics. It is to teach the young about the virtues of the ancient art of becoming and (sooner than you'd think) being a poet - within the brief span of five or six lessons, one per class, with the rowdies on the wrong side of the door.

With that in mind, poets flood into schools and are usually confronted with one of two questions. Are they famous? Are they Roger McGough? In the majority of cases, the answer to both is in the negative. So life goes on.

The authors of this handsome new anthology of poetic forms also teach poetry, but not in schools. Mark Strand, a former poet laureate of the US, is a university teacher and an excellent poet in his own right. The Dublin-born poet Eavan Boland, also a first-rate practitioner of the art, is currently head of the creative writing programme at Stanford University. Much to the chagrin of the likes of James Fenton, who hates this sort of thing, both are poetry professionals. They write poetry. They teach it. And they talk about it - endlessly.

This book is an anthology of poems with a difference, and the fact that Strand and Boland are poetry professionals has helped to turn it into a first-rate endeavour. If it had been written by some professor of rhetoric - as it would have been at the turn of the last century - it would have been much less insightful, much less useful.

Strand and Boland know poetry and poem-making from the inside. They have wrestled with it, discovered just how bloody-minded language can be when pressed into service. The most extraordinary moment of the book is when Strand, right at the beginning, before the reader has even begun to take breath, introduces us to a poem by Archibald MacLeish about which he felt passionately as a teenager.

It shocked him awake to the wonders of poetry. And it has continued to have a profound effect upon his life. Strand proceeds to give us a long and detailed reading of the poem, which, in spite of its length, is no more than one-10th of what Strand might have said if allowed to let rip to the full. The tragedy is - and we notice this at first reading - that the poem isn't very good. So much for close reading. So much for the impeccable literary taste of Mark Strand. So much for being a sensitive teenager.

The purpose of this book is to instruct us in the business of poetic form. How did the sonnet, for example, come into being? Who practised it first? Where did the villanelle spring from, and who has written in the form down the centuries? The authors probe the nature of different forms interestingly, revealing how certain archaic ones have made an astonishing comeback in our century, and speculating as to why that might be.

One of the most fascinating sections deals with blank verse. We read the earliest examples - from the mid-16th century - and move through the sometimes cardboard grandiloquence of Marlowe to the extraordinary suppleness of Shakespeare. Soaring on the swift wings of poesy, we revisit the Lake Poets and see how blank verse was suited to their revolutionary purposes. And then we come across a fascinating blank... wall.

Very few American poets of the 20th century wrote well in the form. Why is that so? This fact leads the authors to draw attention to the shortcomings of 20th-century American poetic practice - the negative consequences of imagism; the love of short, snappy sentences; the sheer feeling of discomfort when faced with the possibility of eloquence, and what the cause may be from a social point of view.

The book's only major shortcoming is in the area of metrics. It is impossible to divorce a serious appraisal of poetic forms from a discussion of metre and rhyme. And yet those matters are given scant attention. For reasons of space? Which really means for reasons of cost? Probably. More's the pity, though.