What Persists: Selected Essays on Poetry from the Georgia Review, 1988-2014 by Judith Kitchen is a collection of selected essays previously published in the Georgia Review. Kitchen was the author of six books and co-editor of for nonfiction collections. Her awards include two Pushcart Prizes for an essay, the Lillian Fairchild Award for her novel, the Anhinga Prize for poetry, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has served as a judge for the AWP Nonfiction Award, the Pushcart Prize in poetry, the Oregon Book Award, and the Bush Foundation Fellowships, among others. Kitchen was an Advisory and Contributing Editor for The Georgia Review where she was a regular reviewer of poetry.

I am quite new to poetry and enjoy reviewing it. However, I have no formal education in poetry. My area of study is political science and international affairs. I do find poetry a nice balance to the harshness of international dealings. I like the thinking and imagery that poetry delivers to the reader. It is a thinking relaxation for me and I would hate to spoil it with too much analysis.

As an undergraduate, I reviewed T.S. Eliot's “The Wasteland” and I saw it as the aftermath of WWI and treated it in a historical sense. I came close to getting an "F" on that review because I didn't focus on fertility. I documented my findings but that was not good enough. Here is Kitchen's genius. She reviews poems and even if I didn't notice her points, she points them out in a logical and meaningful way. Unlike a student failing to see fertility gods, she gently directs the reader to her findings. After that, she explains her findings by being intimately familiar with the poet’s entire works and who he or she was inspired by. In one poem she critiques she mentions Whitman. I would never have seen it. I wouldn't have figured it out even with a hint. Kitchen points it out and identifies it. She finds themes no matter how minute through a poet’s work. Her mind worked like a wartime code breakers. The message in poetry is not always clear, but Kitchen finds order and meaning in what sometimes appears to be a jumble of words.

I found this collection of essays to be a wealth of information. She showed someone like me what to look for in poetry beyond the emotional effect. She isn’t heavy handed of monolithic in her findings, but she does show an aspiring critic what to look for in a poem. Reading her essays probably did more to open my mind to analyzing poetry than anything I have read or heard. Furthermore, her work tends to be enlightening rather than dictatorial. I will use What Persists many more times as a reference book on criticism more than I will use it as an analysis of the poems covered. It is said no one ever builds statues to critics, but Kitchen deserves one. She had great insight into poetry.

Judith Kitchen has a gift. Not only is she a poet/writer, but I believe she must be part magician as well.

Reading poetry is not always for the faint-hearted. To really dig below the meat of the poem and find the first flash of bone is often a challenge. Assuming charge of that exploration and then sharing that with other potential readers can be a daunting task. But then to add to that complexity-- by layering work upon work and comparing several books of poetry within one cohesive review (and doing it well)-- well that is where the magic appears.

Judith Kitchen's collected essays on poetry are so richly packed and dense with imagery and contemplation, it could take months to sort through everything that is right with them and still be left wondering how she weaves the spell. But one section of one essay struck me as completely appropriate to looking at her work in the big picture.

"Sometimes an individual poem can act as the fixed lens of a static camera. It can put us back in touch with ourselves by inviting a sustained attention, transforming its subject by the quality of the attention being paid... We see more because of that earlier poem; we are attuned to nuance that comes from that earlier poem. We assume a kind of direct lineage, and underlying sensibility that links one with the other."

This is exactly what you gain by reading her essays. You want to reach out and grab each book she's describing, read each poem, see them side by side and exclaim, "Yes!" as you see the connections she's made. You want to reside within the lush walls she's created, analyzing, contemplating, and giving space to the words that seem to flow so effortlessly across the page.

I feel that this is a must-read for graduate poetry students and for anyone who would ever want to write essays on poetry (or reviews in general), and for those interested in finding a deeper path into poems themselves. There is so much to learn from this collection, and an intensity that surpasses my simple review, but I know I will continue to look at this book and thumb through it for years to come.

Intensely inquisitive.

I recall the days when I would spend hours staring at a poem willing it to transform into a language I could understand (especially with Shakespeare's work), a language that would not exhaust me. Weirdly, I had no trouble learning Spanish. But I don't think I ever appreciated poetry, not as much as I'd have liked to. In my English Literature classes I never knew quite what to write in analysing the artist's work, I felt my observations were either shallow or just plainly obvious - I always seemed to be 'grasping at straws'. Therefore, I liked Kitchen's original observations. They were neither 'trying too hard' nor 'meek attempts' at putting down ideas..

If only all poems came with such commentaries, such commentaries may not translate poems but they offer a beautifully, imaginative way to look at a poem. So different to my own, obviously. I'm glad I have not yet finished the work, definitely something I'll save for a warm, calm day.

Smart, original essays that offer fresh perspectives on writers that deserve more attention..

I was an English major in college so this collection of essays was an incredible read.