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 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: David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Richard Jackson, Eric Pankey, Carl Phillips, Stanley Plumly, and Ann Townsend.