“There has long been a gap in the writing trade,” the editors write in the introduction to this unique volume. “Books written to serve writers offer strategies to fight writer’s block, to enrich the creative imagination, and to seek publication—but offer little about how a work evolves through revision, how it gets clearer, stronger, and deeper, start to finish.” Enter The Art of Revising Poetry, which displays side-by-side sets of first drafts and final versions of poems by Jane Hirshfield, Naomi Shihab Nye, Terry Tempest Williams, and eighteen others to track the precise details of the creative process. The behind-the-scenes look includes full-page reproductions from the poets’ personal notebooks and an essay by each poet about “how and why the poem changed between drafts, how it was expanded, distilled, transformed, revised, and finally released from the labors of change.”
