Teaching poets is no easy task. For one thing, it demands an especially keen awareness of a student’s feelings—sensitivity was important in creative writing courses long before these days of microaggressions and snowflakes—as well as an air of authority. Even more than in other courses, the instructor must be both caring and critical, diplomatic and discriminating. And students often believe that because art is subjective, anything goes. (Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing poems.) The best teachers will delicately destroy that misconception.

Gregory Orr manages to transfer that balancing act to the page in A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry. Author of a dozen books of poetry, former poetry editor of the esteemed Virginia Quarterly Review, founder of the University of Virginia’s MFA program in writing, and a professor for over 40 years, Orr achieves a tone that is simultaneously experienced and experimental, authoritative and welcoming, unpretentious and unpatronizing. (True, he may be trying too hard with three long quotations from Jay-Z, but readers should always be grateful when a baby boomer writes a book about poetry that mentions Bob Dylan only once.) And although the book presents itself as an introduction, experienced poets will also find in its pages ideas and pronouncements that provide a new perspective on their craft. Unfortunately, Orr’s dominant interest in one type of poetry, the lyric, deprives aspiring poets of important lessons and skills.