Theresa Eynon > Recent Status Updates

I begin each day with a mug of tea and a poem from this extraordinarily excellent anthology.
It works for me.

Tough going. A book for grammar nerds who want to understand the syntactic difficulty posed by writers including Milton, Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner and Henry James. Picking out and concentrating on their hardest paragraphs...

George Steiner described four types of poetic difficulty. Contingent difficulty requires general knowledge. Modal difficulty require an emotional response. Tactical difficulty is when the poet is deliberately hiding something. Syntactic difficulty is when the poet’s sentence structure ties you in knots.

Dillon has a grammatical approach to syntactic difficulty. It’s not easy, but neither is Paradise Lost.

You don’t have to be a fan of Billy Collins or even a poetry nerd to find this an accessible, enjoyable collection of contemporary poems. Which isn’t to say they are naive or simple. Dig a bit deeper - if you are a literary linguist - and under the whimsy there is an enchanting facility with cognitive metaphors and, despite avoidance of formal forms, a symphony of rhythm, internal rhyme and parallel structures.