I, me, my

ON MODERN POETRY, by Guido Mazzoni (Harvard University Press, US$39.95)

I don’t suppose many people think much about modern lyric poetry. I wrote a PhD about it, so I’ve thought about it more than is probably good for me – but if you ask me what it is, I start bloviating, spouting nonsense. Guido Mazzoni does a better job of it, but in what is a relatively slim volume, he devotes a lot of words to historical, cultural and conceptual frameworks.

Essentially, different times require different forms. Mazzoni doesn’t have much patience with the idea of a zeitgeist, the identifiable, prevailing