Review of Forms of Poetry by Peter Abbs

A detailed Summary of Review of Forms of Poetry by Peter Abbs

Peter Abbs and John Richardson; 1990, Cambridge, CUP

I was introduced to this book via its companion volume, The Forms of Narrative, which I was recommended by a teacher at my Phase One teaching practise school; I could just as easily have used this book for this exercise but I chose the volume, The Forms of Poetry, as I have found it more directly useful so far in my teaching, providing me with many useful ideas.

Both books are identical in layout and format and both are clearly designed to be directly useful teaching tools. They are the kind of books that no English teacher can afford to be without, if only because they attack the teaching of narrative and poetry by using the latest teaching methods and by providing the busy teacher with a host of ideas for running effective and interesting lessons. Both books manage to combine theory and practice in a very bright, modern and profusely illustrated format that is eminently readable and easy to follow. They are aimed at the student rather than the teacher but double up just as easily as a teaching resource, in fact, as I shall make plain later, I feel the book is better as a teaching resource than as a student text-book.

The aim of the book is very clearly and simply stated in its introductory pages: to introduce readers to the literary genre of poetry, its writing and its recording and to enable readers to appreciate and understand it. It does this directly by allowing the experience of poetry to come first wherever possible and so allowing the poetic devices to 'surface' during the reading. At the end of each chapter a series of practical activities and tasks that vary from simple exercises to extended major enterprises.

The voice of poems is covered early on in the book. I have always believed that an understanding of this aspect is crucial to a reading of any poem. Poems are written by poets who, presumably, have a clearly defined purpose and will. Understanding that purpose and will is surely of the highest importance when trying to read a poem and I can accept that the best reading would be one carried out in a 'voice' as close to the internal 'voice' with which the poet wrote his poem. This does not preclude allowing personal readings and interpretations, but being able to approach the original poet's voice is a possibility in most poems and it at least offers us an insight into what s/he was trying to achieve rather than allowing a post-modern deconstructive reading to bury the original purpose of the poem.

Abbs, P., and Richardson, J., THE FORMS OF POETRY, 1990, Cambridge, C.U.P.

To help students write poetry is also an objective of this book and the section entitled, "Observing Closely" helps with this aim. The striking photograph of the peat-embalmed Grauballe Man shows how Heaney found a source of massive inspiration for so many of his poems; similarly the exercise on Horovitz's Sheep's Skull highlights how relatively mundane objects can become objects of powerful poetic inspiration. This chapter alone offers no less than five various assignments to help the student look more closely at their world, not something, in my short experience, that I have found many school students seem to interested in doing!

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Approximate Word count = 1647
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English