51# Book review on Language and Literature

My review of Lesley Jeffries’ The language of contemporary poetry: A framework for poetic analysis (Palgrave 2022) is now out on the online version of Language and Literature!

Jeffries’ monograph is genuinely important as it provides a principled and capacious framework for the analysis of poetic discourse. It is both a testament to Jeffries’s long-standing committment to the stylistic analysis of poetry, and to the contribution stylistics can make to linguistic theory. As I write in my review,

The book’s aim is ‘to give readers a systematic and replicable method for considering which features are present in poems they read and to interpret those features in the light of the specific text under scrutiny’ (2022: 4). Such concern with systematicity and replicability informs the expository fabric of the whole work, as well as the stylistic analysis underpinning it. In practice, Jeffries undertakes a multi-feature analysis of 27 contemporary poems – all of which fully reproduced in the appendix (pp. 255-272) to ensure verifiability – and teases out how each feature contributes to the poems’ overall textual meaning and effects. In doing so, Jeffries traces shared strategies and recurring effects, thus reviving the comparative nature of early stylistics.

To access my full review, click here. If you work in stylistics and discourse analysis (because poetic discourse is a kind of discourse!), this is a must-have, which has inspired me in ways that, hopefully, will become apparent in the not too far future.