“To judge from two recent novels, Ian McEwan‘s Saturday and Vendela Vida‘s And Now You Can Go, it might be easier to save your bacon with a neatly deployed rondeau than anyone ever suspected,” observes David Orr. “In each book, an impending act of violence is prevented not by the arrival of a SWAT team but by the recitation of a poem — and not a ‘spoken word’ poem, or a pop lyric masquerading as a poem, but a regular old poem poem.” In his column for The New York Times Book Review, Orr says, “If you’re a poetry reader, it’s hard not to feel heartened and vaguely flattered by these scenes. Not only do the characters seem to enjoy poetry (and to know it cold), but poems themselves come off as active and useful — powerful, even.” It’s enough to inspire Orr to consider Auden‘s statement that “poetry makes nothing happen,” and give it a fresh reading: Auden, he says, is “making a tremendous boast in the form of a dismissal. After all, any beginning comes from nothing.”