The book is divided into three parts: "Riddle" (literary riddles), "Bind" (poems written in formal constraints) and "&" (poems that are both riddles and bound in some matter).
I was delighted to find both riddles and constrained forms in this collection. I was also really impressed and inspired by the way that Nick Montfort structured the collection. He begins with an introduction, "Solving Poems," which lays out his notion of riddles, and more or less informs the reader that he's working in the riddle form. He also identifies two other riddlers (besides the Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon): May Swenson and Emily Dickinson. I'm very grateful for these tips (and any others that readers may wish to send in my direction!). I'd been mulling over the notion of Dickinson as a riddler for some time but I hadn't had a chance to immerse myself in her work (yet). Montfort's comments on her poems are really illuminating and argued quite succinctly.
Another note on structure: Montfort includes an answer key, both to the riddles, and to the constrained poems, wherein he identifies the form or game he is playing in each instance. In the case of the riddles, however, Montfort does not simply supply the answers. Rather, he first makes a point of stating that his "answers" are only as he envisioned them, thus allowing for alternative interpretations the reader might supply (as in all poetry!). Further, the answers themselves are additionally veiled through what appears to be hieroglyphics. The reader must, in other words, solve an additional riddle to access the answers to the riddles of the book. Ingenius! Montfort is not so callous towards his readers, however; he includes a pangram on the first page to assist in the decoding of the hieroglyphics.
I haven't yet had a chance to read the entire book, but I was interested that Montfort's riddles do not mimic the anglo-saxon hemistichs as other practitioners of mock anglo-saxon verse (Earle Birney). Rather (and I'm still not great at poetry vocabulary) they appear to be written in free verse with one series of poems written in tercets and iambic pentameter.
I really love how the book plays with concealing and revealing. Montfort lays out his mission in the introduction, and includes very thorough notes at the end of the book including the forms and allusions of each piece, which might suggest he is working in utter transparency. At the same time, however, he is writing poems in the form of riddles, arguably the most concealed of all poetic forms. This tension between the impersonal form and personal gesture towards the reader is incredibly compelling.
I'm thinking of the image of a veil which reappears throughout Spenser's Faerie Queene: the veil is a metaphor for how metaphor operates in that it simultaneously reveals the truth and yet also hides it. Don McKay's thoughts on metaphor in his essay, "From Here to Infinity or So" also springs to mind: it is only through metaphor that we are able to gain access to what is otherwise impossible to conceive, like notions of geologically time. Or, as in Spenser, the trace of "pressed gras" that remains the only evidence of Gloriana and the divine...
In his introduction, Montfort states: "My own sense is that solving a riddle should align and open the poem resoundingly, revealing new ways of seeing and other fields of questions that lie beyond the first question and answer" (xiii). Indeed! In this sense I sincerely believe, (similar, perhaps, to Northrop Frye's notion in his essay "Charms and Riddles") that riddles are the basis of all poetry, the foundation of all metaphor.
I'm incredibly excited to read this book and hear about other collections of riddles!
Here is a Dickinson's poem I like, for your reference. Jim
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