Reading Poetry

Reading Poetry: A Complete Coursebook (3rd Edition) is a textbook that introduces the analytical skills and critical awareness needed to interpret verse. Across seventeen staged chapters, the volume examines over 200 poems by more than 100 writers, ranging from ancient Greece and China to the twenty-first century.

The text guides readers from formal features and figurative language to broader literary concerns. It addresses genre, intertextuality, Caribbean and world poetry, and the ways poetic works respond to ecological crisis.

Designed for individual study as well as university and college courses, the book includes 122 poems quoted in full, along with end-of-chapter workshop exercises and an extensive glossary of poetic and critical terms.