The Lyric Now

"The word "now" in the title of this book by poet-critic James Longenbach does double duty: both as the lyric sense of the present, as well as how American poems over the last century have continued to assert their "now"-ness. Ranging from Modernist greats (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore) through midcentury poets (George Oppen and Robert Lowell) to Longenbach's contemporaries (Jorie Graham, Carl Phillips, and Sally Keith), he deftly shifts the terms of Modernism allowing us to see, within Modernist innovation, common strategies, psychological predicaments, and aesthetic solutions. He makes a case for the continuity of poetry in this country, as one reviewer puts it, "a vision of lyric poetry that is always seeking 'newer' answers but doesn't concern itself with 'new' answers, or fool itself that what it's doing is utterly original, unique, or personal." "The Lyric Now" is a beautifully written book, and few critics currently writing are, as a reviewer wrote, better at "explaining how poems work, how literary history happens, and why we should care about both" than Longenbach"--