Where the bee sucks

by Robert Peters

# “Peters’ criticism is not maternal. . . insights are set down simply, unornamented, as if intended to glance off, and yet I think they are important, and belong to the center. . . The book deserves numerous readers, particularly among young poets dissatisfied with the celebrities who keep writing the same poem over and over again. . . [His] essay on Creeley is superb; the best essay on his work I know.” — Robert Bly on the first Great American Poetry Bakeoff in American Book Review # “ Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly "It's hard to dislike a poetry critic who chooses to discuss John Ashbery in the form of a mock-colloquy between two overeducated characters named Dick and Jane ("Reaming eucalyptus roots from sewer lines is simpler than deciphering Ashbery," Dick asserts). Peters ( Poems, Selected and New ) takes a refreshingly unacademic approach to the assessment of contemporary American poetry; these essays, representing his work of the last quarter century, try to cut a pat