Andy Grace asked on The Kenyon Review Blog,

When was the last time you read a truly scathing review of a book of poetry?

It’s a good question. I think, first and foremost, a review should be honest. Scathing if necessary, but honest.

Grace goes on to provide a good discussion of the literary review and the state of the review today. There just simply isn’t enough reviewers and the few that are reviewing poetry books aren’t doing a real honest job of it. The mindset that some people have, to discuss only the good books and not the bad, isn’t helpful. I think it is helpful to discuss what is bad and why it’s bad.

This sentence caught my attention:

There are some pretty obvious reasons: it’s no secret that most reviewers of poetry are poets themselves, and understandably people want to avoid making waves, or even possibly damaging the careers of others.

This might be a problem for nontenured professors who are trying to earn tenure. You don’t want to ruin your chances by pissing off the people who can help you get tenure by trashing someone they like. So it’s safer to only do positive reviews. If you are independent and have no axe to grind, or roses to plant, then it’s easier to do the negative reviews. You might run into the possibility of editors not publishing your poetry because of a review you wrote of their book or someone that they admire, but there is no shortage of literary journals that publish poetry so it should be safe waters.

When I first started to write reviews for World Class Poetry, I thought that I would only do positive reviews. But then it occurred to me that as much can be learned from a negative review as can be learned from a positive one. In fact, one could learn a great deal more from a negative review.

When I survey the landscape of American poetry today I see several hurdles that must be overcome before we can move on to the next great wave. Among those hurdles is the lack of serious poetry reviews. One hurdle that is mentioned, perhaps too often, is the lack of readers. But I think that may have something to do with the fact that we have too few honest and serious reviewers writing quality literary reviews for a general audience. It’s one thing to write a review for a literary audience. It’s quite another to write for a general audience.

Newspapers don’t publish many book reviews any more and they certainly don’t mess with poetry reviews. That’s a big hurdle because it means that good poetry books are less accessible to the general population, many members of which may not know where to look for them. Even many literary journals – good journals even – don’t publish reviews any more. Rattle, one of my favorites, has stopped publishing reviews in its print journal and instead only publishes them as .pdf files in electronic format. There is no doubt a good reason for that, but it does make those reviews less accessible to a certain audience.

Another reason negative poetry reviews may not be published very often is because it is much more difficult to write a negative review. If you like a book you can write about its virtues easily without having to worry about stepping on toes or wording your praise in such away that it doesn’t come across as needless grinding, gut punching, or axe grinding. Negative reviews can come out wrong if you aren’t careful about how you word your criticisms. Many writers may not want to spend the time necessary to think about how to package a negative review so that it is received in the right frame of mind. That’s another big hurdle, but it’s a hurdle that I believe needs to be overcome. A writer of negative reviews has to be able to write about a book in such a way that it doesn’t seem like he has it out for the author or is using a personal grudge to finish an old score. In circles as small as poetry, where the number of working poets is in the four zero range, that’s an important concern and it could be a clue as to why many negative reviews that should get written don’t.

As Grace says in his final paragraph:

The fact is that we need negative reviews. If book reviews basically become the same thing as a really long blurb, then the whole enterprise of reviewing would be extremely silly.

Amen. And then he goes on to say

I think that taking a stand against something can be just as important as advocating for something. If negative reviews can stay above of the fray of bitchiness and cliquishness, they can remind us that poetry matters enough to take a public stand against trends you see as detrimental to the art. Or, at the very least, negative reviews and the controversy they often spark can open up new discussions, which is always positive.

A good reviewer is one who can write a negative review and teach us something about ourselves and our work that we can take and improve upon. Reviewers must see themselves as teachers without succumbing to lecturing or giving in to didactic prose. Negative reviews are necessary because they teach us to be patient, strive for excellence, and, like a good parent, lead us to examine ourselves toward better behavior and higher literary achievements.