Radiant Lyre

Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry is a significant new book on poetry from its earliest, traditional roots to its most recent and fractured forms. The essays gathered here, by an array of brilliant contemporary poets, explore the history of the lyric poem, its rhetorical modes and strategies. How does the lyric operate in an elegy, a love poem, or an ode? How is meaning conveyed by a pastoral poem, the sublime, the narrative? How does the lyric investigate nature, beauty, and time? How are these lyric forms and strategies received? Radiant Lyre gives the contemporary reader a sense of the origin, evolution, and present status of the modes and means of lyric poetry.

David Baker and Ann Townsend, themselves esteemed lyric poets, have introduced and edited an important anthology, vital to any serious reader of poetry. Contributors include: Linda Gregerson, Richard Jackson, Eric Pankey, Carl Phillips, and Stanley Plumly.

“Radiant Lyre refreshes and deepens our reading of lyric poetry. It illuminates poetic thinking. It is a rare critical book—at once artful, pragmatic, and radiant.” —Edward Hirsch

“Radiant Lyre reveals many insights into the making and reading of poetry, and offers a valuable survey of the dominant features of lyric forms. Yet, of most importance, it is a book of happy immediacy—as if these seven poets decided to put on a pot of coffee and stay up talking, with much knowledge and enthusiasm, about poems all night.” —Susan Stewart