Great Regulars: At best, the author follows

the course Stephen King takes in "The Tommyknockers" and skims over his protagonist's occupation in order to concentrate on the perilous effects of buried alien spacecraft.

Yet somehow Nicholson Baker has written a novel about poetry that's actually about poetry--and that is also startlingly perceptive and ardent, both as a work of fiction and as a representation of the kind of thinking that poetry readers do. "The Anthologist" is the story of Paul Chowder, a semi-successful, middle-aged American poet trying and mostly failing to write the introduction to an anthology called "Only Rhyme."

from David Orr: The New York Times: Rhyme and Unreason
also The New York Times: Excerpt: 'The Anthologist'

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