Intended to impart the basic ways a poem is constructed, this concise handbook is a prose guide to writing poetry. The handbook talks about meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense, iambs and trochees, couplets and sonnets, and how and why this should matter to any person writing or reading poetry. Interspersing history and analysis with exemplary poems (those of William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Walt Whitman, for example), the handbook is divided into short chapters on sound, the line, imagery, tone, received forms, and free verse. The handbook also considers the need for revision and the pros and cons of writing workshops. (NKA)