Review of Dawn Potter’s Books. A Must Read

Of late I’ve gone back to read books by Dawn Potter. For any poet, established or novice, The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet is such a delightful personal and informative book. The way Dawn delves into a poem, discusses what strikes her, how she are enamored with a phrase, a line, a stanza, an image, and then, taking that as a starting point, talk about craft is marvelous. Since she doesn’t focus on any one technique or any one element of craft, each section stands as its own testimony. Her looking at some classics like Shelly and Coleridge got me interested in them, and, while I was in the same radical time period when the poets were beating the drum of revolution, standing up against the Tory government, the oppression of the poor, I let Keats and Byron, two other poets who, as I read them and read their biographies, seem to speak to me more today with our own Tory government in the guise of Republicans and Trump as loudly as any of our contemporary writers. 

I also picked up her short book Vagabond’s Bookshelf: A Reader’s Memoir. I love how she takes us into your life with books. I remember, a decade or so ago, Edward Hirsh wrote a book called How to Read a Poem that carried us through his life as he stumbled upon poems that, once he read them, changed how he saw himself and the world. It was an intimate book, letting us in on his world, his sensibilities. I used to use it as a model for students to write about a poem not from a dry analytical perspective but from the heart.

Dawn’s description In the Vagabond’s Bookshelf of reading Dickens’ David Copperfield motivated me to go back to read him again. Like her, for she identified with a female character in the novel, but for different reasons, I was struck with how much David’s story, his wanting to see if he’d be the hero of his life, brought back my own life, some of my earlier years. I remember having a friendship as he did, one in which I worshiped and loved my friend as one would love a lover only more deeply, more completely.

I found myself thinking that if only modern novels could take off the mask or irony and let themselves be able to indulge in sentimentality, into letting characters feel deeply, cry, mourn, despair, the better we would be.

Instead we have sitcoms based on cynical putdowns, indifference, stereotypes. We have so many novels about violence, violation, and venery that it sickens me.  Where is compassion? What about empathy being a character trait? Alas!

Not to be. But if any of you know of good books, ones with characters who dare to feel and to love and to care, pass them onto me.