On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes

What a bad title for such a good--and, paradoxically, ambitious--book: though it presents itself as a low-pressure journal, the inconsequential deeds and recollections of a senior professor in a sabbatical year, On Leave unfolds to reveal a meditation on the anecdote as a form; an elegant sketch of grief, and of partial recovery; a calm revolt against the conventions of one-point-in-front-of-another, stiffly ineffective, argument about modern poetry; and (best of all) an amenable introduction to the sometimes prickly, too often unapproachable "avant-garde" (or, if you prefer, "post-avant") poets in Britain, Ireland, and America, among whom Tuma has made his lit-crit career.--Stephen Burt "Rain Taxi "