Clive James has done this with his Poetry Notebook, pointing me towards poets I have not yet explored and sending me back to look anew at some I have grappled with in the past.
I am an academically ignorant but evangelistic lover of poetry, a love that I have struggled to explain eloquently to my family, who are probably fed up with my ranting.
If only I could have said: ''One hears the force of real poetry at first glance. There is a phrase, something you want to say aloud. Very occasionally, there is a whole poem: a stand-alone unity that insists on being heard entire, and threatens never to leave one's memory.''
James may be recognised by many for his television work, but he is the author of more than 40 books.
These works include essays, novels, literary and television criticism, autobiography and poems.
He says the book can be guaranteed not to treat poetry as anything less than the occupation of a lifetime.
It does not disappoint.
It includes analysis of the techniques of a range of poets and his reflections on returning to much loved poems years later.
He tells us his five favourite poetry books are: The Tower (W. B. Yeats), Collected Poems (Robert Frost), Look, Stranger! (W. H. Auden), Poems 1943-1956 (Richard Wilbur) and The Whitsun Weddings (Phillip Larkin).
Hone Tuwhare is the only New Zealand poet to get a mention in the book, as far as I could tell. (An index would have been handy.)
James' writing is, as ever, sharp and witty and fabulous.
If, like me, you often find a poem that resonates but you cannot really understand why, it is reassuring to read him talking about an early affection for E. E. Cummings' lines that ''verged on nonsense''.
''But whatever he was talking about, even if it was nothing, his phonetic force drove whole poems into my head like golden nails. Fifty years later, I'm still trying to figure out just how the propulsive energy that drives a line of poetry joins up with the binding energy that holds a poem together.''
It is a pity there is not more about female poets.
James is apologetic about this, saying it is possible to look forward to a time when women will dominate the art, but that in his time, men did.
He is a little worried this work might make him look like a chauvinist, but he does not believe he is.
''Will I get myself off the hook just by saying that I ended up with almost as many lines by Elizabeth Bishop in my head as by Robert Lowell?''
Who knows?
But in the meantime, I have poetry to read: Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Longley, Peter Porter, Christian Wiman, Marianne Moore.
• Elspeth McLean is an ODT columnist and former health reporter.
