This book is a mixed bag. I found some parts highly useful. The glossary, for instance, should be read completely as it explicates many aspects of poetry structure and content. And the first few chapters are very useful in helping the beginning poetry reader to understand what a poem is. Other parts were close to useless for me. Why a whole chapter on post-WW2 Polish poetry? Why does Hirsch rely so much on translated poems for his examples? There are several chapters - Hirsch's "Five Acts" chapter comes to mind - that presumes a broad understanding and experience with various poets. "Think of..." begins many sentences in this book, each one concluding with a reference to some poet or poem I've never read. Be sure you bone up on little-used, oft confused words (dialectic, didactic, fictive, brio, and vatic are words he loves to use). A better title of this book might be "How Edward Hirsch Reads a Poem: And Why Edward Hirsch Fell in Love with Poetry." But I say if you're serious about reading poetry, then it behooves you to read this book. It will be slow-going but in the end, it's worth the effort.

I love pretty much everything about this book - it’s rich in content with an inspiring message, there are introductions to new poets, treatises on life and the poetics of living it. Hirsh is beginning to lose me a little in the glossary, I’ve made it to H - haiku, but think I’d better start writing about the pleasure I’m getting from this book before becoming completely befuddled.
The poet and critic Edward Hirsh just has a lovely way about him. From chapter 1, Message In A Bottle, he had me hooked. I think it’s his absolute adoration for the alchemy of poetry that is so infectious. How he relates rhythm to the ‘pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves’, this kind/way of writing really attracts me. The soulfulness, the heart, the sincerity of it - like when he speaks about Apollinaire’s calligramme’s, ‘the writer puts the rain down on the page, the reader lets it fall’. In chapter 7, Beyond Desolation, he talks about how the despair and lonliness of the writer can be changed into a relationship with a future reader, he says ‘the poet disappears into the poem, which stands mute, like an idol, until the reader breathes life back into it. And only then does it shimmer again with imaginative presence.’ How beautiful is that?
I do love poetry and am pleased that I’ve read work by about 70% of the poets he examines, from Whitman to Neruda; Szymborska to Borges; Hikmet to Akmatova, but there are many I’ve never heard of. Hirsh, helpfully, includes a catalogue of all the writers mentioned in the book however, from Asia to Europe to North & South America.
For anyone new to poetry, anyone wondering what all the fuss is about, then this book is a treasure trove, it contains all sorts of information about what poetry is, who writes it and why, about the processes involved and what your responsibility is as a reader. There is no question that you will fall in love. :)
For anyone already loved up and feeling all the benefits of a poetic relationship, this book serves as an endorsement, a confirmation that you couldn’t be in a better partnership, that poetry will never let you down, will always be there for you, whether in Whitman’s Midnight or Salinas’ Day, in good times and bad, poetry is the fire that feeds our lives.
Highly recommended.

Different from the usual introduction to poetry textbook because all the terms like enjambment and alliteration are defined in the back in the glossary only and the emphasis is on the poems themselves, and on the feeling of the poems more than their meaning. Also the choice of poems is different, with less emphasis on the great names of English language poetry to include more poetry in translation from Latin America and Eastern Europe especially. Many of the poems address massive human rights violations from a personal standpoint, lots of requiems and impending death.

I was expecting a selection of poems and commentary/analysis on them, organized in a structure which improves the reader's ability to comprehend more nuanced poetry. Instead, I found this book contained mostly gushing descriptions of how great poetry is, without any real tangible wisdom for improving one's ability to appreciate it.

e.g. “Lyric poetry is one of the soul's natural habitats. The poem of high spiritual attainment has the power, the almost magical potential, to re-lease something that dwells deep within us.”

Each chapter is devoted to a different theme that appears often in lyric poetry: death, bliss, epiphany... Hirsch then takes several very different poems related to that theme and analyzes them. The focus is on enjoyment of reading poetry, not on the technique (despite including a long glossary at the end of the book). If you're looking for an introductory textbook on poetry, look elsewhere. I liked the diversity of authors and eras, though the choice is heavily biased towards American poetry from the 19th and 20th centuries. I also liked the author's beautiful and concise sentences, with a rich and precise vocabulary. This book took me some time to finish because it required a lot of contemplation. Some chapters (essays?) are less interesting than others, but that probably depends on the reader's personal preference.

3/5 stars
I feel like this title is a bit misleading. Rather than bring a guide to reading an experiencing poetry, it’s more of a love letter to an an analysis of poems. I still liked a lot of it. However, the chapters are very dense, making it hard to read. It took me months to read this book because I kept having to put it down for a break. There’s some good information, but it’s bogged down by overly purple prose, and it is unnecessarily verbose. I get wanting to write poetically for a book on poetry, but it was too much. ome of the chapters were on topics that didn’t interest me, and the writing made it harder for me to focus on them and get through those parts. There were also a lot of references to poets and poems that went over my head because I wasn’t familiar with them. While it renewed my interest in poetry and I discovered new poets I like, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend How to Read a Poem to people who are new to poetry. However, I am glad to say I found some modern poetry that I might actually like? The chapter on Post-War Polish Poetry And just the whole Discourse on poetry as a form of social justice was fascinating to me.

At times too long winded and wordy for its own good, this not-really-a-"how to book"-at-all is an interesting mixture of analysis and meditation on the power and complexities of poetry as a whole and especially the individual poems that Hirsch pulls apart on many levels. The poems he selected are not commonly anthologized and few are contemporary. They range from ancient Greece to Eastern European to South American with touches of Auden and a bit of Dickinson, Whitman, and Stevens added at the end. This book is not so much for the beginner but better for those who already have an appreciation for poetry and the patience to travel along with Hirsch's thoughtful and passionate readings.