"Poems That Lean Into Calm and Joy Amid Life’s Chaos" by Professor Stephanie Burt

Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English Stephanie Burt reviewes four new poetry collections, including Visiting Lecturer on English Dwayne Betts' Doggerel. 

Tender figures of fatherhood, raising boys; idyllic walks and a “bike ride” through “Italian countryside”; the poet’s Jack Russell (called Taylor or Tay-Tay); and other “small/Dogs who appreciate the chance silence/Gives” unite to make Betts’s fourth book of poems, Doggerel, a welcome respite from almost every other serious book of poems you could read this year.

Domestic calm and the chance to catch your breath carry more meaning here beside the earlier life Betts recalls in other poems: Incarcerated as a teenager, Betts (“Felon,” “Bastards of the Reagan Era”) found acclaim in his 20s with carefully observed verse about the ordeals and lessons of prison. Now a Yale-trained lawyer, memoirist and MacArthur “genius” fellow (as well as a visiting lecturer at Harvard, where I also teach), Betts can still look back on his time behind bars, when the word “kite” meant a letter from outside, an imaginative flight. He takes in, too, his sometimes chaotic childhood in Washington, D.C., comparing it to his own modern family: “the only burden too/Worrying is never seeing your father/Weep.” Few poets match Betts’s way with quotable rhetoric. Better yet, he gives good advice: “Suffering in art feels like somebody made/It to tomorrow, at least.”

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