Review of Forms of Poetry by Peter Abbs
Peter Abbs and John Richardson; 1990, Cambridge, CUPI 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.
Poems are written by poets who, presumably, have a clearly defined purpose and will. The chapter concentrates on visual imagery, both in the form of pictures and words and demonstrates the importance to our understanding of songs of pattern . 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. This is something that I, too, feel is very important and I agree with the authors that "there need be no division between formal understanding and living response" (Page 6). By understanding the terminology a student has the most accurate means - and the quickest - of explaining the figurative or rhetorical effects that he has discovered working on her / his consciousness. To help students write poetry is also an objective of this book and the section entitled, "Observing Closely" helps with this aim. Forms of Poetry, however, is more squarely aimed at, I believe, brighter pupils from Years 9 - 13. The introduction to Chapter 6, "Using Imagination", carries a long quotation from Ted Hughes book, Poetry in the Making (Faber and Faber) and this advice couples well with one of the assignments given at the end of the same chapter. The voice of poems is covered early on in the book. I have mentioned the Grauballe Man, but as well, there are, Stone-Age engravings, Blake's engravings, beautiful photographs of the old and young, surreal and 'dream' photographs and so on. At the end of each chapter a series of practical activities and tasks that vary from simple exercises to extended major enterprises. I believe that there is also an important secondary effect of learning the correct names for the various more common figures of speech, although it seems to be an unfashionable and much derided reason in my experience so far, that it helps to signify that language study is a serious field of study. I have always believed that an understanding of this aspect is crucial to a reading of any poem. In fact, it has been my experience that the academic level of the book is rather highly pitched, a fact that is all they more obvious if the book is compared with, say, the equally excellent, Benton and Foxes', Teaching Literature (Oxford).
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