The Enemy's Country: Words, Contexture, and Other Circumstances of Language.

After an introduction urging students of poetry to interest themselves in literary theory, David Buchbinder offers chapters on New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Russian Formalism, and poetry and history, plus a chapter on poetry and gender by Barbara H. Milech. Each chapter concludes with an illustrative analysis of a short poetic text and there are suggestions for further reading, but the book does not fare well in the obvious comparison with Raman Selden's Practising Theory and Reading Literature (1989). Where Buchbinder speaks of a 'British school of New Criticism' and sees the 'Chicago' critics as basically New Critics too, Selden's account of literary theory and its history is more incisive. He is also more useful than Buchbinder, analysing not only a wider range of poems but passages from plays and prose fiction as well, and providing stepping-stones to further reading and independent work in the form of carefully constructed exercises.

Anne Ridler has brought together three of her lectures. One is about English religious poetry, broadly enough defined to embrace twentieth-century poets' 'acknowledgement of God's reality through the perception of his absence', and another is about English verse rhythm. These pieces are not up to date on …