How to Read a Poem. . .and Start a Poetry Circle by Molly Peacock ff. This is a book of stunning generosity, which conveys the interplay of life, teaching, and poetry; it gives the readers the go-ahead to seek personal meaning in poetry and to trust the connections and insights they can tease out themselves. Having gone to graduate school when a poem was viewed as a hermetically sealed aesthetic object, I find Molly’s lyrical exegeses, her willingness to cross from the poem to her own life, to be liberating. The poems she chooses are her personal talismans, as she calls them, works that speak to her. She models the search for a richer, more examined life through poetry. I’m hoping that many of her readers follow her suggestions for forming a poetry circle.
