Jeff Dolven's poems take the guise of fables, parables, allegories, jokes, riddles, and other familiar forms. So, there is an initial comfort: I remember this, the reader thinks, from the stories of childhood . . . . But wait, something is off. In each poem, an uncanny conceit surprises the form, a highway paved with highwaymen, a school for shame, a family of chairs. Dolven makes these strange wagers with the grace and edgy precision of a metaphysical poet, and there are moments when we might imagine ourselves to be somewhere in the company of Donne or Spenser. Then we encounter -The...

Style is everywhere, but it evades criticism--especially now, when an age of interpretation asks us to look right through it. And yet style does so much tacit work, telling time, telling us apart, telling us who we are. What place does it have among our moment's favored categories of form, history, meaning? What do we miss if we fail to look at it, to talk about it?
Senses of Style essays an answer, stylishly. An experiment in criticism, crossing four hundred years and written in four hundred brief, aphoristic remarks, it is a book of theory steeped in examples. It...