Soul Says : On Recent Poetry

In this collection of essays on recent American, British and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows how contemporary life and culture is captured in lyric form by a number of well-known poets.

Vendler explains the power of such poetry; it is, she says, the voice of the soul rather than the socially marked self speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse. "Soul Says", the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, is thus the name of this collection.

In essays on Seamus Heaney, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham and others, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible.

She reveals the idiosyncratic nature of lyric form, and points out the artistic choices present in even the simplest texts.

Vendler examines the use of abstraction in lyric poems; considers what readers seek and receive from verse; describes the role of such stylistic devices as compression, structural dynamics, and syntactic ordering; and renders a wide variety of poetic style meaningful.

Vendler shows how lyric poetry, speaking with natural musicality and rhythm, can by arrangement, pacing, metaphor, and tone create symbol from fact - and fill us with new understanding. In these direct and engaged commentaries, she explores the force, beauty, and intellectual complexity of contemporary lyric verse.