The Brooklyn Rail

Jeff Dolven’s * A New English Grammar

If you squint through the wrong eye, you might mistake *A New English Grammar, a collection of poems by Jeff Dolven, for one of the dense grammar workbooks to which its title playfully refers. That’s because this book is split down the middle: hold it open before you, and on the left hand page you will find an itemized prose analysis of a grammatical rule. On the right hand page you will find nine lines of verse divided into three tercet stanzas. It’s a curiously rigid structure, yet one well suited to Dolven’s deceptively radical task.