Diane Seuss has spent a career writing poems that feel like they shouldn't work — too raw, too funny, too formally ambitious all at once — and then making them work anyway. Modern Poetry, her sixth collection and follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning frank: sonnets, takes its title from the textbook she encountered as a child and again as a struggling college student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. This is a book about what poetry is, who gets to have it, and what it costs the people who spend their lives inside it.
It arrives weighted with accolades — National Book Award finalist, Griffin Prize finalist, New Yorker Essential Read — and for once, the accolades are earned. This is Seuss at full stretch, which is saying something considerable.
What this book is
The collection works through forms borrowed from music: ballads, fugues, arias, refrains, codas. This is apt, because the book is fundamentally about the relationship between form and the chaos it contains. Seuss grew up in a rural Michigan household of genuine privation, and Modern Poetry returns repeatedly to the question of who poetry's canonical forms were designed for, and what happens when someone arrives at them from the outside. The book is, in this sense, both a love letter to and a reckoning with the tradition she has absorbed.
The poems contend openly with writers from the canon — Keats most prominently, but also Plath, O'Hara, Dickinson — treating them less as influences to be genuflected toward and more as presences to argue with. Seuss's relationship to Dickinson is particularly charged: she quotes her, quarrels with her, and at moments seems to be writing from inside the same kind of loneliness, dressed in different century's clothes.
The poems themselves
The poems move with what one critic accurately called "rangy curiosity" — they digress, double back, let the music of a phrase lead somewhere unexpected and then stay there longer than you'd expect. There is sharp humor here, the kind that is inseparable from real grief. There is also a willingness to be caught not knowing, to let the poem's speaker be exposed in her confusion, her longing, her sense of arriving late to something that was always supposed to be hers.
"It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem. You can't hide / from what you made / inside what you made."
That self-implicating honesty is the collection's central nerve. Seuss is writing in and about the poem at the same time, and the double focus produces a productive vertiginousness. The poem is simultaneously a thing being made and a thing being questioned — and the question is not rhetorical. She genuinely doesn't know whether it's enough. What she finds, at the end, is that it is. Just. The love that surfaces in the final poems is not triumphant but it is real, and it arrives as a surprise even to the poet who wrote it.
Keats as interlocutor
Keats appears throughout as a kind of ghost interlocutor — lover, rival, and fellow outsider to the citadels of literary authority. The parallel between Keats's class anxiety and Seuss's own relationship to the academy is not forced; it is genuinely illuminating. Both are writers whose formal mastery was acquired against the grain of where they started, and both use that hard-won mastery to describe what the acquisition cost them. Seuss's elegies for what was lost — the years of uncertainty, the people left behind — carry the weight of that cost without becoming self-pitying. The book is too curious, too genuinely funny in places, to stay long in mourning.
One reservation
The collection is not without unevenness. The early poems, which establish the book's terms most explicitly, occasionally feel like throat-clearing before the argument proper begins. The musical forms introduced in the opening sections are not consistently sustained — some of what is labelled a "fugue" or "aria" reads more like an extended lyric meditation than a poem genuinely shaped by musical structure. These are minor complaints against a book of otherwise formidable achievement, but worth noting for readers who come to it expecting formal rigor throughout.
Final verdict
Modern Poetry is the kind of book that changes how you read its author's earlier work and makes you want to reread everything. It is ambitious in the way that only books written by poets who have earned the right to be ambitious can be — the ambition here comes from hard experience, not aspiration. Seuss has written a book about whether poetry is worth it, and answered, by the act of writing it, that it is. That's not a small thing. Very few books manage it.
If you have not read Seuss before, start with frank: sonnets and come here second. If you have read her, you already know why this matters. Either way, read it.
