As with the previous five books in the successful and "wonderfully informative" (San Francisco Chronicle) Brush Up series, Brush Up Your Poetry! is both a lively primer and a fascinating look at how our language evolved, by focusing on well-known words and phrases coined in a rich selection of all poems great and small (as Coleridge would have put it). Readers will savor the familiar and classically poetic--like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" and John Donne's "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls"--but they will also discover the myriad well-known phrases that you would never expect to come from poems, such as Chaucer's "In one ear and out the other" and Longfellow's "Into each life some rain must fall."

You won't have to know an anapest from a dactyl to appreciate the power of verse that has inspired generations; Michael Macrone places all the memorable phrases and lines in context, and concisely conveys the heart and mind of each poet. And there are surprises as well--many phrases coined in poems have taken on completely different meanings with time, and some lines don't go quite as elegantly as we remember them--Robert Frost's famous road was "the one less traveled by." It will be enough to make lovers of poetry and novices alike "trip the light fantastic" (Milton).

Michael Macrone, Ph.D., is the author of seven previous books on language and literature, including the national bestseller Brush Up Your Shakespeare! He lives in San Francisco, where he writes, designs, and performs with the "acid folk" band Dreamland.

The most recent Brush Up book, EUREKA!, has been licensed in 10 foreign countries

The Brush Up Series has sold over 200,000 copies

"The popular series has taken a whimsical look at such topics as Archimedes, fuzzy logic, cybernetics and manifest destiny. With advanced degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and Brown University, Macrone has the kind of eclectic training that appears to have been purposely assembled for writers of popularized reference works." -- San Jose Mercury News

256 pages
Hardcover, slip-cased
$19.95
January